


The Quiet Disciple

by ApprenticeofDoyle



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, Bisexual John Watson, Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Fluff, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Minor peril, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Post-Reichenbach, Story: The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez, Watson waxing poetic, but with some radical alterations ;), mild jealousy, this began as a gay pastiche but quickly escalated into something very self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23882872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApprenticeofDoyle/pseuds/ApprenticeofDoyle
Summary: "There have only been two times in my life where I have regretted putting my adventures with Holmes to paper. Both of these instances occurred on the same case, nearly two weeks ago, and leveled such an impact that I have questioned whether or not I could continue—in good conscience, and for either of our sakes."November, 1894. A case in Kent goes dreadfully awry, and forces Holmes and Watson to admit feelings long nurtured and long concealed.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 92
Kudos: 177





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Hello lovelies. Here it is, the first Sherlock Holmes fic I've ever had the courage to publish. ACD's stories were my first love. John Watson remains my favorite literary character of all time. I have carried a love for Sherlock Holmes stories and the mystery solving duo of Holmes and Watson throughout my entire life. Though I have written many Holmes fics, I never post: Holmes and Watson possess such unique voices (which often elude me) and I have a bad habit of sabotaging my own writing by being completely over the top (in my eagerness, and desire to get it right). But I'm tired of being anxious about my own writing and just want to share some joy in this tough time. So here it is, warts and all (with lots and lots of love, and not a beta in sight).
> 
> You are welcome to imagine any version of Holmes and Watson you like (I imagine Brett and Burke--or Hardwicke--or a version of Paget's illustrations myself). This is a fledgling attempt to have fun with a classic case, and to tweak an ending that never really suited me (spoilers for a hundred year old story, but I never did understand the suicide at the end of "Pince Nez"). Rest assured (as you can see by the tags), no suicide will occur in this fic.
> 
> Initial lines and set-up are paraphrased/borrowed from ACD's short story, and gradually level off after the case is introduced ;) Enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watson wakes from a nightmare, and turns to the pen for solace.

**The Quiet Disciple**

_chapter one  
_

It was in the winter of ‘94, I believe, that the popularity of my stories about Sherlock Holmes reached its zenith. 

It is true that in the time since I first published, public following of my humble narrations has oscillated depending on any number of factors. Certain elements of drama, political events abroad, and even the turning of the seasons all pose impact on the vogue of my issues in the _Strand._ Without much preening, I’m pleased to report there are a few stories that have gained particular notoriety among some circles—more notably, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “the Redheaded League” (and, though I care not to recall its circumstances nor the state in which I wrote it, “the Final Problem”). As a result of my moderate success in spreading word of the genius residing within the mind of my dear friend, we have become accustomed to receiving odd telegrams, unexpected visitors, and strange letters with irregular frequency. Indeed, some of Holmes’s most fascinating cases have emerged wholly unexpected on our doorstep from out of the London grey. In November of ‘94, 221B Baker Street was receiving entreaties—written, typed, and in person—in such a number and kind that even Holmes, whose keen mind is so carnivorous for challenge that it wastes away in slightest inaction, was taken aback by the petitions which clamored for his attention.

Often Holmes has teased, needled, and questioned my decision to put our adventures to paper, but never once in our partnership has he asked me to cease my writings. Only, wisely, has he requested I censor or withhold sensitive information from the public should the spotlight cause harm to innocent parties. He has offered no lack of _critique_ _,_ certainly, on how I should hone my stories more precisely on the cool delivery of facts—the “severe and deliberate” techniques of logical deduction—but I fancy in my heart of hearts that Holmes, though he could care less for the fame of it all, is satisfied with my transcriptions of our work together. Not with their accuracy, as I am no doubt incapable of replicating his observations to the man’s own standards, but rather for how the craft so occupies myself in the days and weeks between cases. I believe that Holmes recognizes the happiness that penning our time together grants in me, even in his lowest fits of melancholy. In the least, he has found amusement in my mutterings and exclamations—even laughter, in my infrequent, brooding struggles to find the proper words to describe him, our cases, and his inimitable derivations. (He does not realize, in the slightest, how often he escapes my abilities of description.)

However, I am burdened to admit that November of last year led the both of us to view my modest productions, and the public esteem attached to them, with notably less favor.

There have only been two times in my life where I have regretted putting my adventures with Holmes to paper. Both of these instances occurred on the same case, nearly two weeks ago, and leveled such an impact that I have questioned whether or not I can continue—in good conscience, and for either of our sakes.

It is precisely this case that lingers in my mind this morning. I woke to dusk with the sound of rushing water in my ears, slick with sweat and gasping for air. I twisted in my sheets, heart pounding, the details of the dream clinging to my consciousness with awful clarity. Now I sit, nerves quivering, blankets rucked around a body that remembers an icy cold it does not truly feel.

Time has taught me the solace of writing. Before Holmes—before the war even—whenever my heart was plagued with anxieties, I had found comfort in the recording of my thoughts. I seek its balmy reprieve now, in the low-lit silence of my bedroom. Even Holmes, sense and God willing, will not be awake at this hour, and I would not disturb him with my weakness for a decade’s pension.

Perhaps in transcribing the events that inspired the nightmare haunting my nerves, its influence will be purged. It will never enter the light of day nor the pages of the _Strand,_ not as it truly occurred. It is a risk to record it here now, in my most private of journals. But I crave relief and despise the frailty in my bones, and writing is the only cure I know for bad dreams that does not damn me to addiction. So nevertheless...I will write it down. If not to unravel the dark tangle of emotions lurking in my mind as I sit in bed, waiting for the morning sun to rise, then at least to finally grant these events the same treatment as my other adventures with Holmes. They deserve that, and more, for all their consequences have changed my life so utterly since.

* * *

“Another deluge,” Holmes said one chilly morning, as I mustered into the sitting room with the faintest of winter twinges in my leg.

It was not yet nine thirty a.m., and my friend sat folded in his armchair with a scowl eminent for a man so inundated with criminal delights. His Stradivarius was half clutched to his chest but his bow was nowhere to be seen; Holmes did his best thinking with the violin in hand, but music was not always a necessary component to his ruminations. (Out loud I have teased my friend that the instrument is the closest thing to an infant child that Holmes will ever call his own, and privately, I regard the unconscious comfort he finds in holding it with no little fondness.)

“The perils of fame,” I observed dryly, seeing he was not speaking of the rain outside. Behind him sat a prolific new pile of letters and telegrams, cast upon my desk with distaste that mirrored my own feelings about them. In the beginning, the many missives from potential clients and fans had been a point of pride and interest, but now they were a chore. (They could hardly be Holmes’s duty, after all, when it was I who had brought such attentions upon us; besides, after so many uninteresting or tedious missives Holmes could become quite unbearable.) Some were remarkable, and stirred _my_ attention even if they did not, in fact, stimulate my good friend, but a great deal more of them were dull, vague, or enthusiastic in a most off-putting way. I, for one, had ceased to find flirtatious or overzealous letters addressed to Holmes amusing; the man himself had declared his intent to burn the next letter to reach him soaked in lady’s perfume, and I was inclined to concur—if not to spare Holmes’s sensitive olfactory senses, then at least to divert my own discomfort with such advances.

It was not that I was concerned Holmes would find such baseless coquetry appealing. To the profound and permanent disappointment of England's broader population—enamored by his mind’s reputation or in person by his striking, statuesque looks—flirtation bounced seamless across my friend’s awareness like marbles off a drumhead. In all our years of friendship, he had never intimated any interest whatsoever in courting, the fairer sex, or more primitive human entanglements to me. The complexities of romance were often ignored by my friend in our investigations until proven relevant. Holmes did not seem to care for, or indeed care to understand, the affairs of the heart which so tempt and vex our species, and in fact sometimes disapproved of such fixations, vocally and in earnest. I myself left the topic alone unless we encountered crimes of passion, and in these moments where Holmes muttered his frustrations to the air about the foolishness of mortal _amour,_ I held my tongue.

I confess, it was not out of respect for my dear friend’s preferences that I abstained from the subject. No, I am afraid this evasion came from much more cowardly, selfish warrens within my heart. It served simultaneously as self-restraint and self-preservation, much connected to the pique that welled so irrationally within me at every admiring letter Holmes received. For my own sake, I did not prod Holmes for his thoughts on subjects of love or romantic ceremony. I did not pursue his rhetorical asides on the impracticalities of the human heart with questions of my own, as I did with most other perspectives my friend presented to me.

No, I did not ask, because I did not want him to look at me when he answered. I could not bear that quicksilver gaze upon my face, the dissemination of every nuance in my expressions as I spoke to him of such things. I could not endure those honed senses turned upon me, laying bare every secret locked in my breast. I let lie his commentary on the nature and conduct of the heart, because, in truth, it was only a matter of time before he realized the state of mine. I was delaying the inevitable, as long as I could, gutless and futile in my months-long attempt to disguise the love I harbored for my dearest friend.

It is clear to me now that my mind has been infatuated with Sherlock Holmes since the very first week of our acquaintance. Though it took several years for my heart and spirit to follow suit—through grieving for him after the trials of Reichenbach and Moriarty, and after the loss of my beloved Mary—I can say with confidence that I am deeply, irretrievably, and imprudently in love with him. I acknowledge the injudiciousness of my affection daily, but with every added moment shared with Holmes, I am made more powerless to the singular joy that his company provides me.

Before I met Holmes, I had already been introduced and made comfortable with my inverted interest in other men. My experiences in school and the barracks had led me to multiple, if infrequent, encounters with other single fellows from the time I returned to London. As a doctor and accordingly a man of science, I have never considered my interests or congress with other men to be an act against either Nature or God. My private actions—despite the religious doctrine and psychological writings of so many of my contemporaries—have harmed no one or brought anything less than pleasure to myself and to others.

Regardless of my past and self-reckoning, the period of my life before Holmes was markedly unattached, romantically speaking, to any partners I had communed with. That is to say, I have never _loved_ a man, with the fullest and tenderest capacity of my heart, before I loved Sherlock Holmes. I daresay I am unlikely to care so profoundly for another in the future.

Despite my feelings, and disregarding how often he captained my thoughts in the day and their quieter, tugging night wanderings, I was content with my relationship with Holmes, and not merely because I knew that his reciprocation of my feelings was quite impossible. He was my closest friend and confidant, a man with whom I shared more than lodgings, adventure, and goodwill. He was my time-tested, mosaic, ingenious companion, exceptional in mind and his meaning to me. I was happy. With our days, with our shared meals, our conversations and orchestra shows, and our cross-country investigations. I treasured our time together, unembittered, with the memory of life without him a still-healing wound in my mind.

A part of me hoped that Holmes had long since identified and dismissed my affliction for him as irrelevant to our partnership. Another part, one much less logical and far more wary, feared instead the moment when Holmes would recognize the longing in me and pull away.

The twinging in my leg in the cold dragged me from my maudlin over the morning’s Everest of new post. Behind me, Holmes made a distracted noise.

“Do sit down, Watson. I have already sent Mrs. Hudson for tea."

The prospect of tea and breakfast was of minor comfort and better distraction, and I followed Holmes’s directive to sit, rubbing gentle circles into my upper quadriceps.

“How did you know I'd be down?" I asked, to draw him from his glassy-eyed fixation on the wallpaper. Holmes was still in his robe, the pale cotton nightshirt beneath drawing his skin porcelain in the cool London morning. His hair was uncombed, dark fringe across a pinched brow.

“A trifle,” he said. He lifted a disinterested hand. “Your box spring has accumulated rust and there is a particular squeak when you emerge from it in the mornings and a quieter creak of metal when, after matters of hygiene, you once again sit—on the edge of your bed, of course, your slippers remain there after you take them off at night—to put them on. There is an average of three to five minutes between the time you sit to put on your house-clothes and the time you come downstairs, time spent on your kinaesthetics. I called for tea at the first creak.”

“To think I considered Mrs. Hudson omniscient in my sleeping patterns to now,” I quipped, and a cloudy grey eye turned my direction.

“I am aware of the difference when you are genuinely unobservant or merely playing at blindness, Watson." For a moment I waited beneath the weight of his eyes, watching his presence in the moment flicker like the light of a weak candle as his mind spirited in directions unseen. Finally, his mouth twitched in a facsimile of a smile, his attention returning fully to myself and the room around us.

“Your intention to distract me from my ruminations is also quite opaque, my dear fellow,” he said, face clearing. “However appreciated, your concern is misplaced. I assure you that my silence is productive, not melancholic.” He gestured with a hand to his desk opposite him, and I saw that his microscope had been unearthed from its home in his bedroom and positioned next to an unfamiliar collection of yellowed papers. “I spent much of last night deciphering a new palimpsest I acquired from a fellow scholar at Oxford. He bargains its creation to early Rome but I found an inscription—the faintest imprint through layers of atramentum—that just might point to earlier Etruscan usage.”

“Very good,” I said, glad to hear that my friend's mood would not match the weather outside, and Holmes raised an eyebrow at me, eyes moving in that thoughtless, scanning manner of his down my body. I directed my attention elsewhere to keep myself from shifting under those smoke-colored eyes. Cold leached from the windows in tendrils, and the sound of rain was a low hum in my ears. Noticing the empty hearth, I gingerly stood to rouse a fire, and as I did so Mrs. Hudson, directly on time, brought in a tray with a kettle I could see issuing steam from a distance.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson,” Holmes said, perfunctory and unmoving from his fixed point on his study. I echoed the sentiment gratefully over my tinderbox. She nodded and left us, and after producing flame and rubbing my hands together, I made way towards our dining table eager to wrap my hands around a warm cup.

“Come have some tea, Holmes,” I entreated. “It’s ghastly cold in here.”

“Is it? I had not noticed.” Regardless, he rose from his chair, the fabric of his robe smoothing in a silken line down his lean frame. “My apologies, Watson. I should have lit the hearth hours ago.”

I waved my hand, clearing away the apology if not the sentiment. “Come, tea, fresh and hot,” I pressed, and the frown that had been carved into his mouth faded some at my tone. I offered him a smile as he sat down across from me, crossing a leg over another, and I began to pour. I would have traditional English breakfast, but Holmes preferred Earl Grey’s Mixture.

“Have we a case on the docket for today, or does the manuscript hold your attention?”

“The manuscript can wait,” Holmes said, drumming his fingers on the table as I carefully turned hot water into his cup. “And the puzzles offered in the post last week have been dealt with.”

“All of them?” I said, surprised. Holmes scowled. It appeared my instincts about Holmes’s mood were correct, palimpsest or no.

“Yes. The ones you sorted for me were trite affairs. Falsified, in the case of a few. One was interesting but the client will not be in country for yet another month, and another won’t require follow up for, say, another nine.” My eyebrow went up at that particular number, but he carried on. “All in all, a disappointing collection.”

“Sorry, old chap,” I said sympathetically. “But perhaps we need the break. It was only last week we settled that affair with that Huret fellow. Believe it or not, we are lucky that assassins do not come along every day.” Holmes snorted.

“I saw that you hung the Order of the Legion of Honor certificate,” he said, amused. Precise fingers went up to his fringe to push back the hair from his face.

“But of course I hung it. It came with an autograph from the French president. I’m certain the walls are as proud of it as I am.” Holmes’s mouth twitched, frown wiped from his visage as intended, and I slid greedy fingers around the heated porcelain of my teacup.

“I shall sort through this morning’s missives for something more engaging, then. But perhaps you should take the opportunity to recuperate. Do you know if there are any performances in town this evening? We’ve not had the chance to attend one in quite a while.”

A considering beat, and Holmes said, “A capital idea, Watson.” His eyes were bright at the suggestion indeed, and I leaned back in surprise. He was not often so amenable to suggestions we turn from the Work when it was lacking, but perhaps for once he missed music more than the game. “A travelling string group from Prague will be performing Dvořák this weekend, and I should very much like to see it. How does that strike you?”

“A plan, then!" I said, too pleased. “But today?”

Below our feet, there was the faint rumble of the front door opening and the sound of boots crossing the threshold, and we met eyes.

“It appears our schedule may be booked,” Holmes observed, lip a subtle curl over his teacup, and the two of us turned to face the apartment door as someone joined Mrs. Hudson up the stairs.

“The detective Hopkins for you, Mr. Holmes,” Mrs. Hudson announced upon opening our door wide, and the young inspector bowed his head in greeting. His waterproof glistened with morning rain.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson. Could you please bring us another round of tea, oh thank you. Come in, my dear sir, Watson has just lit a fire and you are clammy with cold.”

I made to stand and help the lad with his coat, but Holmes rose faster than I, a hand patting my shoulder just once as he passed me to take the man’s jacket and hang it on the rack.

“Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” Hopkins said. “Forgive my disturbing you at this early hour without sending word, I’m afraid I had little opportunity to telegram.”

“Good morning, inspector, it’s quite alright. Won’t you sit?” I asked, and he obliged.

Inspector Hopkins is a dedicated, newly promoted officer, and by and large, he’s one of the few lads at the Yard that Holmes considers worth his salt. He’s young and quick and eager to learn, a far cry from many of the old dogs in the force, but more to his credit the young inspector is hardworking without a shred of arrogance in him. To my endless amusement, he also finds Holmes’s intellect totally inspirational. He needs never say as much aloud; it’s all too clear in his starry-eyed manner and impressed ejaculations whenever Holmes does something expectedly brilliant. I admit, he often reminds me of myself early on in my partnership with Holmes—frequently bowled over with wonder that such a shrewd mind exists, and determined to impress the man who wields it.

“I see you've had a busy morning, inspector,” Holmes remarked, and I watched him cast about for his pipe with a subtle, _subito_ energy. “And how were the suburbs of Kent this gloomy morning?”

Hopkins lit up like a sparkler, delighted. “Mr. Holmes! However did you guess I came from Kent?”

“Oh, but he does not _guess_ , my dear Inspector,” I said, with admitted cheek. “Perhaps he learned it from the faint brown-black mud on your boots.”

“Mm, perhaps,” said Holmes, tossing a wink my direction, and I hummed, smiling.

"Or more likely, the train stub sticking out of your jacket pocket, Inspector."

"Top form, Watson." My smile evolved, and I hid a proud blush in the steam of my teacup. 

“Suppose I walked right into that one. Mr. Holmes, have you seen anything of the Yoxley case in the latest edition?” 

“I’ve seen nothing later than the Western Roman empire today.”

Hopkins blinked owlishly and I bit back a laugh. “I. Well, sir. It was only a paragraph in this morning’s paper, and all wrong at that, so you’ve not missed anything. I haven’t let the grass grow under my feet. It’s down in Kent, just as you surmised, seven miles from Chatham and three from the railway line. I was wired for early this morning, reached Yoxley Place at six, conducted my investigation, and was back at Charing Cross by nine, and came straight to you by cab.”

“Which means, I suppose, that you are not quite clear about your case.” Holmes lit his pipe, sucked, and gave it an exploratory puff. “Go on.”

“It means that I can make neither head nor tail or it,” the detective replied, with the little snubbed pride that I so approved of. “So far as I can see, it’s just as tangled a business as I ever handled, and yet at first it seemed so simple that one couldn’t go wrong. There’s no _motive,_ Mr. Holmes, that’s what bothers me. I can't put my hand on the why. Here’s a man dead—no denying that—but so far as I can see, no reason on earth why anyone should wish him harm.”

A suspected murder, then. Holmes puffed some more, a canny, familiar light sparking in his eyes. “Let us hear about it.”

“I’ve got the facts pretty clear. All I want now is to know what they all mean. The story, so far as I can make it out, is like this—some years ago this country house, Yoxley Old Place, was bought by an elderly man, a retired professor by the name Nicholas Coram. He's an invalid, keeps to his bed half the time, and the other half he moves about the house with a wheeled chair or he's pushed about by his gardener. He was well liked by the few neighbors who called upon him, and has the reputation of being a very learned man. His household used to consist of an elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Marker, and of a maid, one Susan Tartlon. They’ve both been with him since his arrival three years back, and they seem to be women of excellent character. The Professor, he’s writing a learned book, and he found it necessary about six months ago to engage a secretary. The first two were not successes, but the third, a Mr. Willoughby Smith, applied and was hired in September. He was a young man straight from university, and seemed to have been just what his employer wanted.”

Mrs. Hudson entered with more tea, setting it down on the table before me, and I prepared the young inspector a cuppa as he continued to speak. “His work consisted in writing all the morning to the Professor’s dictation, and he usually spent the evening hunting up references and passages which bore upon the next day’s work. He would also transcribe the man’s notes, for his eyesight is failing in his age. Now, this Willoughby Smith has nothing against him in character or history, neither as a boy at Uppingham or a young man at Cambridge—I have seen his testimonials, and from the first he was a decent, quiet, hardworking fellow, no weak spot in him at all.” Hopkins sighed heavily. “And yet this is the lad who met his death early this morning in the Professor’s study, under circumstances which can point only to murder.”

I have often wondered at the changes my life with Holmes has rendered in me. Before his companionship, my heart would have dropped in sympathy at the mention of murder. Now, however, though I do feel for victims whose injustices we aim to resolve, my pulse tends to race with excitement instead of dread.

“Do continue,” Holmes said intently, and his eyes flickered to mine with an intrigue that reflected my own. I buried a smile as I extended tea to the inspector.

“If you were to search all England,” said Hopkins, taking the cup with a grateful nod. “I don’t suppose you could find a household more self-contained or free from outside influences. Whole weeks would pass and not one of them would leave the estate. The Professor is buried in his work, it seems, and exists for nothing else. Young Smith knew nobody in the neighborhood, and lived very much as his employer did in his guest rooms. The two women had nothing to take them from the house. Mortimer the gardener, who wheels the bath-chair, he’s an Army pensioner—an old Crimean man of excellent character. He does not live in the house, but in a small cottage behind the manor, which he boards with Mrs. Marker. Those are the only people that you would find within the grounds of Yoxley Old Place. At the same time, the gate of the garden is only a hundred yards from the main road to town. It opens with a latch always left unchained, and there is nothing preventing anyone from walking in.”

“Our first witness, the maid Susan Tarlton, is the only person who can say anything positive about the matter. She reports that the act occurred late in the evening, near midnight. She was engaged until half past eleven, preparing for bed in her room upstairs. The Professor had long since turned in, as he frequently sleeps away the chronic pain spurred by poor weather, and the house, as she claims, was empty at the time, save for the victim. Willoughby Smith had been in his guest room—which doubled as his study in the day—when last she saw him. The maid heard him in his room on her way to her own quarters that night during her last circle of duty, while ensuring the windows and doors to be locked. She did not lay eyes upon him directly, and claims she could be mistaken in her identification of his quick, firm tread behind his door. Not a few minutes after settling into bed, she heard a dreadful cry echo up from Mr. Smith’s room below her. She described the scream as dreadful, but so hoarse and strange it could not be distinguished from that of a man or a woman. She states it petrified her, and that she waited a minute or so in bed, uncertain if she had not in fact imagined the sound in the din from the storm outside. However, before she made a decision, she heard a terrible crash that shook the whole house—the sound of shattering glass."

“Gathering her courage, she ran downstairs. She found Mr. Smith’s door shut, and opened it. Inside, she found him stretched upon the floor, lying in a substantial pool of blood, and the bedroom window facing the lawn behind him had been broken. Ms. Tarlton tried to raise Mr. Smith, kneeling outside of the blood which pooled beneath him, but some of it stained the fabric of her nightdress. Mr. Smith had been pierced by a very small but very deep wound at the neck, a wound which had divided the carotid artery. The instrument with which the injury had been inflicted lay upon the carpet beside him. It was one of those small sealing-wax knives to be found on old-fashioned writing-tables, with an ivory handle and a stiff blade. Later, we learned it was part of the fittings of Professor Coram’s own desk.”

Hopkins took a moment to sip on his tea, and I watched him with mind whirring, playing the scene he had just described to me in my mind. Stabbed in the neck by a sudden intruder, in the late, stormy hours of the night. A grim fate for anyone, let alone a young man and guest in another’s home.

“At first, the maid thought young Smith was already dead, but upon touching his face to check for signs of life, he opened his eyes for an instant.” Across from the inspector, Holmes visibly returned from the crime scene in his mind to the spirit of the moment, chin lifting in sudden attention. Hopkins lowered his cup to lean forward slowly, caught up in the drama of his own dark narrative. “The lad evidently spoke to her, in his last moments. _‘The Professor,’_ he said. _‘It was she.’”_

 _“She?”_ I echoed, and Hopkins nodded. Holmes gave a prickly hum over his pipe, prodding Hopkins not to dally in his delivery.

“The maid is prepared to swear that those were the exact words,” Hopkins intoned. “He tried desperately to say something else, and he held his right hand up in the air, perhaps reaching for her. But he fell back dead before he managed it, or another word. She ran for the cottage in the back of the estate, and after waking the housekeeper and Mortimer they dashed back to the house to wake the professor. They found him sitting up in bed, horribly agitated, for he had heard enough to convince him that something terrible had occurred. However, his physical state left him unable to get out of bed alone to see for himself what had transpired. Mortimer and Susan both swear he was still in his night-clothes, and indeed, that it’s impossible for him to dress or leave bed without the gardener’s assistance.”

“The Professor himself declares that he woke to the cry and heard the sound of glass breaking, but that he knows nothing more. He can give no explanation of the young man’s last words, but imagines that they were the outcome of delirium in dying. He believes that Willoughby Smith had not an enemy in the world, and can give no reason for the crime. His first action was to send Mortimer to fetch the local police. Nothing was moved until I got there early this morning, and strict orders were given that no one should walk upon the paths leading to the house, lest they trample over evidence of the perpetrator.” Hopkins gave a small, proud smile. “It was a splendid chance of putting your theories into practice, Mr. Holmes. There was really nothing wanting.”

“Except for myself, of course,” said Holmes, with a mildly bitter smile. I felt myself frown, and thought to ask him later properly what burdened his mind this morning, other than an Etruscan palimpsest. “Well, let us hear about it, Hopkins. What sort of job did you make of it?”

Hopkins carefully set down his tea, looking somewhat uncertain. “I must ask you first, Mr. Holmes, to glance at this rough plan, which will give you a general idea of the position of the Professor’s study and the various points of the case.” He unfolded a rough chart pulled from his jacket pocket, and laid it with some awkwardness across Holmes’s knee. I slowly stood and moved behind Holmes’s study to witness it myself as my friend smoothed it across the surface of his lower thigh. It was a rudimentary drawing, sketching the estate from a bird’s eye view to give an image of the manor, its path to the road, the walled perimeter around the property, and the modest servant’s cottage. Near the rear of the rectangle labeled ‘manor’, there was a hinge representing a door, and on the west-facing side of the house was a small x, labelled ‘Smith window’.

“It’s very rough, of course, and only deals with the essential points. The rest, I’m certain, you will see later for yourself. Now, first of all, presuming that the assassin entered the house, how did they come in? Undoubtedly by the garden path from the front gate, of course, but either way, they had to, somehow, enter either the front or the back door—both of which were locked. The back door is the likelier candidate, from which there is direct access to the study where the murderer might have gotten the murder weapon, and the victim’s adjoining bedroom. Any other way would have been exceedingly complicated and unlikely. As for the trail itself, the escape through the window should have left an easy enough path to detect, correct? It had been raining that night, and the ground was saturated and certainly would have shown footmarks.” Hopkins pressed his lips together, his brow knitted together in seriousness. “But my examination showed me that I was dealing with a cautious and expert criminal. No distinct footmarks were to be found on any path, coming or going.”

“No traces at all?” I repeated, confounded, and Holmes said nothing below me, mind no doubt riveted to the case in calculating straits beyond where my own acted as echo chamber. “Not even directly outside the broken window?”

“The grass _was_ trodden down,” Hopkins clarified. “But I could not find anything in the nature of distinct impression. There could be no question that someone had passed along the grass border which lines the path to the estate, and that he had done so to avoid leaving a clear track in the rain-soaked dirt. The fact remains, someone _must_ have passed. There’s simply no other way off the premises, the brick border wall of the property is tall, mortared brick and beyond scaling, especially in stormy weather—and it could only have been the murderer, since neither the gardener nor anyone else had been there that morning and the rain had only begun during the night.”

“One moment,” interrupted Holmes. “Where does this path lead to?”

“To the gate, opening onto the main road to Chatham.”

“How long is it?”

“A hundred yards or so from the manor.”

“At the point where the path passes through the gate, then, you could surely pick up the tracks.”

“Unfortunately, the path is tiled at that point.”

Holmes lowered his pipe, eyes narrowing. “On the road itself?”

“No, it was all trodden into mire.”

Holmes clicked his tongue. “Well then, these tracks upon the grass, were they coming or going?”

Hopkins shook his head. “It was impossible to say. Their outlines weren’t clear.”

“A large foot or a small?” Holmes pressed, voice climbing with a testiness I knew well.

“I could not distinguish.”

Holmes gave an impatient huff. “It has been pouring rain and blowing a hurricane ever since. It will be harder to read now than the palimpsest!” He sighed sharply. “Well, it can’t be helped. What did you do, Hopkins, after you had made certain that you had made certain of nothing?” Through years of practice, my expression did not change at Holmes’s snappishness, and I swallowed any chance of a chuckle at poor Hopkins’s expense.

“I think I made certain of a good deal, Mr. Holmes,” said Hopkins, frowning like a student scolded by his most favorite teacher. “I knew that someone had entered the house cautiously from without. I next examined the corridor outside the room itself. It is lined with coconut matting, and has taken no impression of any kind. The bedroom itself is scantily furnished and carpeted. The main article is a large writing-table with a fixed bureau, which consists of a double column of drawers with a small central cupboard between them. The drawers, it seems, were always open, and nothing of value was kept in them. The Professor assures me that nothing was missing. So, it is certain that no robbery has been committed.”

Hopkins leaned back, arms crossing across his chest. “The young man’s body was found near the bureau, just to left of it; he was not in bed at the time of the attack, but rather, I suspect from the angle of his body, that he was sitting and working late by candlelight. The wound was on the right side of his neck and from behind forwards, angled towards the collarbone—as though he’d stabbed facing away from his attacker when the devil struck him. We found the knife some feet away from the body, so it’s quite impossible he could have fallen upon it, and then there’s the man’s dying words of course. But finally, there was a very important piece of evidence which was found clasped in the dead man’s right hand.”

From his pocket, Hopkins drew a small paper packet. He unfolded it and disclosed a golden pince-nez, with two broken ends of black silk cord dangling from the end of it.

“Willoughby Smith had excellent sight,” he added. “There can be no question that this was snatched from the assassin.”

With little decorum, Holmes swiped the glasses from the inspector’s open palm and examined them with utmost interest. He held them on his own nose, endeavored to read through them, went to the window and stared up at the street with them, and turned them over and over in the morning light. Finally, with a sudden and short chuckle, he returned to his seat and extended the pince-nez back to the inspector, eyes shining with the thrill of deduction.

“You are searching for a woman of good address,” said Holmes smoothly. “Attired like a lady. She has a remarkably thick nose, with eyes which are set close upon either side of it. She has a puckered forehead, a peering expression, and probably rounded shoulders. There are indications that she has had recourse to an optician at least twice during the last few months. As her glasses are of remarkable strength and as opticians are not very numerous, there should be no difficulty in tracing her.”

Holmes smiled at the astonishment of Hopkins, who had in moments ripped a small book from his jacket to write down everything he said, and at my own amazed expression. He would hate to hear it, but his observations often seemed nothing short of divination to me: incredible feats of charm and sorcery, owing nothing to magic but everything to skill. Years passed and he remained extraordinary, while I remained hopelessly impressed by his every insight.

“Fantastic,” I said, with that same foolish, thrilled awe. “However did you determine ‘rounded shoulders’?”

“Surely my deductions are simplicity itself,” Holmes said. His tone was as close as it ever deigned to modesty, but his expression was cocksure and luminous at my praise. “It would be difficult to name any articles which afford a finer field for inference than a pair of glasses—especially so remarkable a pair as these. That they belong to a woman I infer from their delicacy and style, and also, of course, from the last words of the dying man. As to her being a person of refinement and well-dressed, they are, as you perceive, handsomely mounted in solid gold, and it was inconceivable that a woman who wore such glasses could be poor in other respects. You will find that the clips are too wide for your nose, as they were for mine, indicating a particularly broad base. Typically, such a nose is usually short and coarse, and while there are exceptions to this, I am fairly confident. My own face is a narrow one, and yet I find I cannot get my eyes into, or near, the center of these glasses. Therefore, the lady’s eyes are set very near to the sides of her nose. You will perceive, Watson, that the glasses are concave and of unusual strength. A lady whose vision has been so extremely contracted all her life is sure to have the physical characteristics of such vision, which are seen in the forehead, the eyelids, and the shoulders.”

“I do see,” I agreed, mouth twitching at the play of words. Holmes’s eyes rolled to the ceiling, long-suffering, which only broadened my amusement. “I confess, however, I’m unable to understand how you would arrive at the double visit to the optician.”

Holmes gestured to the glasses still in Hopkins’s hand. “The clips are lined with tiny bands of cork to soften the pressure upon the nose. One of these is discolored and slightly worn, but the other is new. Evidently, one has fallen off and been replaced. I should judge that the older of them has not been there for more than a few months. They exactly correspond, so I gather that the lady went back to the same establishment for the second.”

“By George, it’s marvelous!” cried Hopkins. “To think I had all the evidence in my hand and never knew it. I had intended, however, to go the round of London opticians.”

“Of course you did,” Holmes said, smiling benignly. “Meanwhile, have you anything more to tell us about the case?”

Hopkins shook his head. “Nothing, Mr. Holmes. You know as much as I do now—probably more, I should think.” He gave a small smile, and I again appreciated the young man’s curtailed ego. “We have made inquiries as to any stranger seen on the country roads or at the railway station, but we’ve heard of none. What beats me is the utter want of all object in the crime. Not a ghost of a motive can anyone suggest.”

“I suppose you want us to come out sometime this afternoon?”

“If it is not asking too much, Mr. Holmes,” Hopkins said plainly. “It’s a two hour train departing at eleven thirty, if you could join me.”

“Your case has some features of great interest, Inspector.” Holmes smiled. “I shall be happy to look into it. We’ll meet you at the train station within an hour, after Watson has his important breakfast.” I scoffed at the jab but ruined the effect by smiling immediately after.

“Wonderful! Thank you, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson. I shall see you soon.”

Helping the man back into his slicker, Holmes closed the door behind him and turned swiftly on a heel.

“A midnight murder, Watson!” he exclaimed, alive with sudden, crackling energy. “A locked estate, lost tracks, and a mysterious bespectacled woman at the scene of it. What in Ancient Rome could compare?”

“Nothing but the murder of Caesar,” I said, grinning at my friend’s zeal. “A shame Brutus wasn’t a craftier devil. At any rate, I’m glad to put off another stack of post for a proper case.”

“A _proper_ case,” Holmes enthused. A beat, and he said, “You’ll come along with me to Yoxley Old Place, of course?”

At the tail end of his question, an odd thread had unspooled in my friend’s voice; it sounded, for a single moment, as if he were asking the question without total confidence of its answer. The idea I would not join him was strange enough that I experienced a moment of concern—what shadows had this morning’s mood cast over my friend?—and so, as I often did when faced with a somber Holmes, I resorted to good humor.

“After the breakfast I was promised, naturally." Holmes clapped his hands together with a short laugh, his ardor returned with such vivacity that I doubted whether I had seen any hesitation at all.

“Excellent!” He opened the door and sang for our Mrs. Hudson, his powerful voice rippling down the hallway. “ _Mrs. Hudson!_ Watson requires breakfast posthaste, we’ve a train to catch!”

* * *


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The case continues to unfurl.

_chapter two_

By sheer stroke of luck, the rain had ceased on the train ride to Kent, but the cold still nipped at my hands and cheeks and burrowed into my collar. The journey to Yoxley Old Place was secluded and winding; though it wasn’t so far removed from Chatham’s city limits, the curving nature of the road—around thickets of trees left wild to divide the land, and across stony bridges and modest streams—it seemed more like the countryside than a manor not far from town and station. A constable at the manor’s tall brick gate met our taxi at the entrance and allowed the three of us passage, and Holmes had clambered out of the carriage to examine the only way in and out of the manor’s premises with his own senses.

“Well, Wilson, any news?” asked Hopkins.

“No, sir, nothing.”

“No reports of any stranger seen?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you made inquiries at the inns and local lodgings?” Holmes asked. His grey eyes were knife-keen below the brim of his charcoal hat as he studied the garden path leading up to the gate. I could see his ears were pink in the November cold, and watched as his breath puffed in white clouds over his woven scarf. It was a private acknowledgement that I found Holmes most fair when the man was in his element, hot on the trail of the case, and on this bleak, chilly morning, alabaster pale and rosy-eared, my friend looked particularly fine.

“Er, yes,” the constable chirped, perhaps with more exuberance than necessary. I could sympathize. (The last vestiges of my own starstruck dithering around Holmes have yet to fade, years into our partnership. I fear they never will, not so long as a heart beats in my chest and Holmes continues to look, act, and see the world as exceptionally he does.)

“There is no one that we cannot account for,” Hopkins continued. “It’s not an unreasonable walk to town. Anyone might stay there, take a train without being observed. It isn’t so small a township that the locals note every stranger, either.”

He demonstrated to the well-manicured dirt path stretched before them, trailing in a straight line towards the manor in the distance. On both sides of the path, separated by an inch of wet blue grass, were clean, parallel strips of baby’s breath. “Mr. Holmes, this is the main path I spoke of, I’ll pledge my word there was no mark on it yesterday.”

“On which side were the marks on the grass?”

“This side, sir.” He pointed to the side at our right. “This narrow margin of grass between the path and the flowerbed. Gone now, but clear to me then.”

“Mmm, yes,” Holmes hummed, squinting. “Someone indeed has passed along. Observe, two sets of prints, to the gate and back. Our lady must have picked her steps carefully. Walking in the grass would have left a trail, but walking on the dirt path would have left an even clearer one in the fresh mud.”

“Yes, sir, she must have been a cool hand.”

I frowned in thought. “Was it luck, to walk the subtler path in the dark? You say she was careful, but certainly it would have been quite difficult to discern in the stormy darkness which path was firmer and where the mud sank deeper?”

An appreciative gaze met mine, lighting a small warmth in my chest. “And what would such knowledge imply, my dear Watson?”

“…Familiarity,” said I, hopeful to see my guess confirmed in my friend’s features. “With the grounds, or at least the path from the gate to the estate. Enough at least to navigate in the dark after such a stirring event as murder—” My voice lifted with excitement as another realization fell into place. “–and without her glasses after the attack, to boot! Could it be premeditated, Holmes?”

“I would not theorize without data,” said Holmes firmly. “But with all but the murder weapon in question, such observations may eventually prove…revealing.” Holmes’s mouth twisted upwards in my direction, a genuine smile of approval, but I could not bask long in its brilliance with mystery tugging at my friend’s attention. His gaze snapped back to the soaked grass, narrowed and glinting.

“It is a very remarkable performance,” he said lowly. “Very remarkable.” Without provocation, he began marching down the path with us in tow, his voice lifting once more in the crisp country air. “Let us go farther, then! The entrance gate is usually kept open, I suppose? Then this visitor had nothing to do but to walk in. But we cannot assume the killing was premeditated, Watson—however could she have anticipated murder, and yet armed herself with a weapon from inside the house, the Professor’s own study knife? If she had planned it ahead of time, she would have armed herself better, correct?” This last observation was a quieter aside, posed to himself, and clearly, the question was a challenge which invigorated him, judging from the spryness of my friend’s pace.

Like most of Holmes’s acute observations, such a point was obvious once underlined. “So a sudden crime, then? Unanticipated?” Hopkins pressed, as we followed Holmes’s long, energetic strides towards the manor some hundred yards ahead. It was an austere thing, old brown stone and somewhat dour architecture on a cleared, slate green plain.

“I can confirm _nothing,_ inspector, without greater possession of the facts.”

We entered the manor quickly, and its interior proved to be as plain and cheerless as its outside. While there was nary a floorboard unpolished or bannister undusted, the wooden skeleton of the home was dark and uninspired; the home was dreadfully dim. As a doctor, I could not help but disapprove of such darkness in the home of man convalescing. Sunlight was a remarkable restorative, for the mind, body, and heart.

It was the maid, not the manor’s owner, that greeted us in the foyer.

“Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson, this is Ms. Tarlton, the maid.”

The girl in question was a young thing, perhaps twenty, and she practically quivered at Hopkins’s pronunciation of my friend’s name. Internally, I steeled myself at the sight of her admittedly lovely blushing cheeks; I had seen such reactions to my dear friend before and they rarely signaled favorable encounters for either of us.

“Ah. The primary witness,” Holmes said, inclining his head in greeting. It was only through our years of acquaintanceship that I recognized the weariness that moved across his face at the girl’s reaction. “Good afternoon, Ms. Tarlton, I am Sherlock Holmes, and this is my partner, Dr. John Watson. We are here at the invitation of good Inspector Hopkins.”

“I know of you, sir,” Ms. Tarlton said, her voice precarious and trilling like an overexcited flute. “I am a follower of your work!” The excitement flickered somewhat in her soft features, sorrow seeping blue and plaintive into her voice. “…Mr. Smith and I both would converse often about your stories in the _Strand,_ Dr. Watson.” Her eyes, brown as chocolate, met mine. “You have a wonderful way with words, Doctor. The two of us found your writing to be terribly thrilling.”

I blinked, surprised, and felt some minor shame at my first evaluation of the girl. “Thank you, Ms. Tartlon,” I said, mindful to be gentle. Poor dear had lost a friend in young Willoughby, it seemed. “That is kind praise indeed. And how are you faring?”

“I am…better than I was last night,” she offered timidly. She dropped her chin, thin hands wrapped round herself. “It was quite a shock, to find Mr. Smith in such a state, and to watch him…” Her voice went thin, like paper submerged in water, but she recovered herself admirably, looking back up to me. “Thank you for your concern.” She held my eyes for a moment, saying nothing more, and I blinked when Holmes suddenly cleared his throat.

“We appreciate whatever information you can offer us about last night’s events, Ms. Tarlton,” said Holmes, and there was a sharpness to his attention on her that gave me pause. Perhaps he did not trust everything she’d given in her statement to Hopkins? I looked to the girl and saw only an earnest, fragile young woman, but as a man who’d loved a brilliant woman and who’d encountered many more, I knew better than to underestimate the fairer sex at any glance.

“If you’ll indulge me,” Holmes said. “I know you’ve already given your statement to the inspector, but I find it best to hear such things from the source, as it were.”

Blinking and pale, Ms. Tarlton nodded, and after leading us into the large sitting room, she quickly gave us a shorter, more emotional summary of the night’s events that paralleled near-exactly Hopkins’s early recounting to us at Baker Street. Her willingness to meet Holmes’s and my eyes as she recounted the tale only further solidified my impression that she’d had no part in the night’s tragic events.

“And you say there was only a minute or so between the cry and the breaking of the window?”

“Less than, sir.”

With that query, Holmes seemed satisfied with her testimony; smoothly, he asked we be shown the scene of the crime.

“Of course. It is this way, Mr. Holmes.” As she escorted us down the hallway, which was lined with framed photographs and prints of unfamiliar mountains and cityscapes, she turned and offered kindly, “Should the two of you like any refreshment?” Engaging me, she added, “Tea or coffee, perhaps, Dr. Watson?”

“No, thank you,” volleyed Holmes, just as I was opening my mouth. I smiled gratefully at the girl and she flushed rather prettily, no doubt at Holmes’s manners as he charged into the guest room like a hound with a scent. Entering it with Hopkins on my tail, I saw that the room was small and sparse, with many books piled upon the young man’s study and the small, wire-framed bed cleanly made in the corner. What drew my attention first, naturally, was the great jagged hole in the room’s one window, with its wooden panes broken and whatever glass remaining splintered in fractures.

“Well, there can be no doubt the killer exited through the window,” I said. “The hole is certainly large enough for a woman to climb through.”

“Indeed,” Holmes replied. Immediately, he had set to inspecting everything about the scene with energy, kneeling beside the blood stain marring the otherwise pristine paisley carpet, pouring his eyes over the desk and jiggling with the bureau’s drawers. Eventually his attention drew to the broken window, where he hovered intently beside its shattered impression, mouth a moue of thought.

“Watson,” said he, beckoning me close, and I drew magnetically to his side. He pointed a leather-clad finger, and I drew close to inspect its focus: faintly, I saw the whiskering strands of torn fabric in the light caught on the edge of one jut of glass, lilac in color. Torn from a woman’s dress, no doubt, and a fine one at that. My mind boggled at the idea of a highborn lady assassin, blind as a bat and soaked to the bone, and I shook my head in disbelief.

“Ah!” I was dragged from such mental imagery as Holmes spun from the window and slid to his knees, studying the upholstered wooden chair sat next to Smith’s desk. Lifting it by the arms, he looked to me and tilted his neck to the side, gesturing for me to move, and in a sudden movement, swung the chair towards the window. He froze moments before connection, halting the chair in the midair. Promptly, he then returned it to the floor.

“I take it this chair was not _found_ upright when your people arrived at the scene of the crime, Hopkins.”

“Ah. No, sir. Local police righted it, but they reported it cast upon the floor on its side when they first entered the room.”

“Then you did mark the scuffs on the chair legs?”

“In fact I did sir,” said Hopkins proudly.

“And what did you infer?”

Hopkins blinked. “That…it was used to break the window, Mr. Holmes.”

“Yes, inspector, _and?”_ At the man’s blank stare, my friend turned expectantly to me. I smiled with good-natured helplessness, and Holmes sighed, though I could see the thrill of the case barred him from any real disappointment at our lack of vision.

“Note the angle of the markings on the chair. They’re high on the feet, almost near the seat. They came not from breaking the window, but from falling to the side in the struggle and striking the leg of the desk, here.” Holmes pointed into the hollow at the bureau where the feet and chair tuck in, and I saw some scratches in the wood siding. His finger moved then upwards, to the desk itself, where a fat candle spent near to the quick sat next to scattered papers and an open book. “Mr. Smith had been working late when the intruder entered his room. Observe, his bed was not slept in. Now, it’s quite possible he did not hear her enter on the carpet as a result of the storm brewing that night. He had been sitting—”

Holmes meaningfully inclined his head towards me, and I recognized such an entreaty with amusement; my modelling skills were needed. Pleased as always to act under his direction, I allowed him to deliver me into the chair and sat down, bending over the desk as any studious young man would. Holmes hummed his thanks and swung behind me, and I swallowed as I felt his hands lightly hover over my shoulders.

“Here. She entered, came close, and she struck. The blade went deep.” With a closed fist, Holmes pressed a cool, gloved knuckle into the right side of my neck, not far from the artery. Unacknowledged, my heart fluttered in my breast. “But not deep enough. Smith gave a cry and managed to reach back—” A loyal puppet, I clapped one hand over Holmes’s where it pressed into my neck, and lifted the other backwards, reaching blindly behind me towards his face like one surprised and acting in self-defense. I managed to brush his cheek and bit back a foolish, nonsense smile at the feeling of skin. _Steady on,_ I thought, and schooled my expression back to attention _._

“And so he grasped the pince-nez you located, Inspector, and fell from his chair in shock at his wounds, overturning it.” My eyes moved to the scarlet stain on the carpet at our feet, and I felt a pang of pity for the loss of such a young life.

“So what of the chair, Mr. Holmes?” Hopkins asked, returning to the earlier point.

“What does it mean, gentlemen, for an intruder to enter through one assured entrance and to forcibly, and quite _loudly,_ create another one?”

Why _wouldn’t_ the murderer have left the way she came? I wondered, struck. Hopkins looked similarly befuddled, and Holmes spun on a heel, looking once more towards the window.

“Perhaps they feared getting caught fleeing back through the hallway,” Hopkins reasoned.

“It is possible,” Holmes allowed. “However, as Ms. Tarlton so helpfully explained, the storm was so loud last night she almost mistook Mr. Smith’s shout for the wind, and did not head downstairs herself until _after_ hearing the shattering of the window.” His head turned towards me, and I bit back a grin as my friend’s eyes practically danced with anticipation. A proper case, indeed. “But more’s the point, gentlemen, this murderer was bold enough to enter through the back door, enter the study, pilfer the murder weapon from the Professor’s desk, _and_ then sneak into Mr. Smith’s room swiftly, all without being seen.”

“Very bold, _or_ very skilled,” I hummed, brow furrowing in consternation. I remembered my own observation about the path earlier. “And requires a somewhat intimate knowledge of the premises, wouldn’t you say, Holmes?” I was rewarded with another proud glance from my friend that sent warmth blossoming in my chest.

“Indeed,” said Holmes, and the cat-like satisfaction creeping across his face had me quite certain he had pieced together much more of the puzzle than that.

“But if that’s the case, then who? The murderess simply cannot be Ms. Tarlton or the housekeeper,” Hopkins said frustratedly. “Neither of them require corrective lenses!”

“Though I have yet to meet the housekeeper, I can say soundly that Ms. Tarlton has fine vision, and does not fit our profile.” I could not help but notice that this was neither a confirmation or denial of Hopkins’s assessment, and I found myself again wondering at the possible suspicion Holmes could have regarding the grieving maid. But, it was often the case that Holmes would hoard his theories until the moment of revelation, and I consigned myself to the possibility I would not know until the murderer herself was in police cuffs.

Hopkins looked disappointed. “So we are dealing with a stranger after all,” he said tiredly. “An outside party, who could be anywhere from here to Cardiff by now.”

“We know nothing of the sort,” Holmes said, lifting an eyebrow. “But do not despair, good inspector. We have made some progress.” With his typical demonstrative air, he gestured to the bureau, and pulled open its main drawer. Inside, the drawer was empty. “See its hinges, the stripping here.” He pointed to the edges of the drawer, strips of cherry wood chipped away. “Notice it was not locked, but that recently it has been opened so forcibly that the varnish has been chipped away. Such marks aren’t evidence of heavy use, but rather a quick and sudden draw at a poor angle.” Holmes mimed ripping the drawer from its inner shelf.

“Something must have been taken, then,” I said, and frowned. “Didn’t the Professor tell you nothing was missing, Inspector?”

“He did,” Hopkins replied. “But perhaps he doesn’t have knowledge of the man’s personal belongings. Presuming that Mr. Smith was indeed the target, it’s likely if this was a robbery, something of worth was taken that has little to do with the Professor himself.”

“You enter the unreliable realm of speculation, Inspector,” Holmes lectured. “But I require more data to make certain of the facts. I should like to speak to the illustrious Professor, if he is in such a state to greet us. But first—” Holmes moved to the bedroom door and stuck out his head. “Ms. Tarlton, if you please!”

Within moments, the young woman appeared, looking only mildly flustered at Holmes’s obstreperous summoning. “Yes, Mr. Holmes?”

“Ms. Tarlton. Tell me, in the last few weeks, did Mr. Smith ever express any odd behavior in your presence? Any agitation? Concern, anxiety?”

The young lady blinked rapidly. “I, well.” She paused, her delicate features folding in thought. “I can’t say that I noticed anything…odd, sir. We spoke of the usual things, in casual, innocent conversation, that is. This awful weather and the garden, and of—” Pink bloomed in her fair cheeks, and she looked to me with a bashfulness befitting her age. “—of your most recent story, Doctor Watson. Mr. Smith had gotten the latest print in the _Strand_ and was kind enough to share it with me…We found it very exciting, especially the part where—”

“Nothing out of the ordinary, then?” Holmes interrupted, voice curt, and I found myself frowning at his rudeness. My friend could be so very testy when people wasted his time with irrelevant details, but he knew better than to interrupt a young lady. (In retrospect, I’m the fool for believing it. It is true that I love a genius, but occasionally, I also love a boor.)

“I—no,” Ms. Tarlton said, cheeks a proper shade of red now, and I offered her a rueful smile on my friend’s behalf. Her eyes brightened, then, and she blinked. “Oh! Oh, but I do recall he left the manor briefly a few days ago. He sent a letter through the post, I remember he had mentioned the increasing price of stamps.”

“A letter?” Holmes leaned forward. “Did he mention to whom he might have been writing? Family, perhaps, or school friends?”

“No, I’m sorry,” Ms. Tarlton said, shaking her head. Holmes rocked back on his heels, expression going stormy with thought.

“Ah, thank you, Ms. Tarlton,” I said, redirecting her attention lest she mark his contemplation as anger towards herself. “Pray, is the master of the house feeling well enough to speak with us? It is to my understanding he ails poorly in this weather. As a doctor, perhaps I can provide some assistance.”

"I will ask about him," Ms. Tarlton said generously. "He was not feeling well after the inspector spoke to him and complained of pain, but perhaps a doctor as experienced as yourself could offer some him solace, now that the rain has stopped."

"Indeed I could," I said calmly. It was a familiar practice of mine, offering my services—always sincerely given, do not mistake me—as an in-route to speaking with witnesses or potential suspects.

The maid practically beamed at my offer, looking for the first her proper age in the liveliness of her relief, and left us. Holmes muttered something to himself, and I turned to him. "What was that, Holmes?"

Holmes turned his face away, his cinereal eyes scanning the hallway from the open door. "Nothing of relevance," replied Holmes easily. Contrary to his tone, there was a stiffness to his expression that caused me to wonder. Did he question the professor's supposed wellness after his interrogation by police? Feeling the same ache in my shoulder from that damned Jezail bullet, I was all too familiar with the discomfort rain and cold could bring old injuries. Perhaps Holmes was merely reacting to the maid's chipper nature; my friend was positively arctic in the presence of most women for reasons I can barely comprehend and scarcely approve. (The Woman is an outlier and exception to his general avoidance of the fairer sex: her influence, I believe, has been key for his giving credence where it was due to the capabilities and strengths of women, but it has been a slow process over time—and I confess I cannot see my dear friend spending substantial time with ladies of his own free will outside the boundaries of a case any time soon.)

At any rate, I dismissed Holmes's curious expression: his friendship has made a reluctant skeptic out of me, and I found it easier on the whole to have faith in his abilities and see the truth carried out in due time.

Ms. Tarlton returned swiftly from upstairs as Holmes was poking around the hallway, idly studying the wall hangings and the floor. As she reached the last step on the stair, he rejoined us at my elbow. Judging from her optimistic expression, luck was on our side. 

"Professor Coram will see you, Dr. Watson, Mr. Holmes." 

The inspector and I followed Holmes's brisk foray up the stairs, trailing behind the maid. The second floor mirrored the first, a long hallway on either side of the staircase with rooms lining north and south. Holmes halted as we stepped into the east hallway, canting his head left and right down the hallway.

"Just a moment, Ms. Tarlton. Your room, miss, it's just there? Located above Mr. Smith's?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the rest of the house rooms, miss? How many bedrooms?"

"The Professor's room is just here, sir," she said, pointing left down the east hall. "This closed door is a linen closet. The west hallway is more guest rooms, yet, three in number with a bathroom at the north end of the west hall. Downstairs is the sitting room of course, sir, and the Professor's study, and another storage room for Mrs. Marker's use. The west wing houses the kitchens, the dining room, the game room and the Professor's library."

"So the murderer entered from the back door, and had to pass through the kitchens," I said, and my hand went into my jacket for my notebook. "Then, she had to turn left into the lower east hallway, enter the study to take the knife...then move back through the hallway to the next room, where Smith was staying." I paused in my scrawling, looking up. Not a linear path, by any means.

"Ms. Tarlton," said Holmes. "Do you perhaps know why Mr. Smith resided on the first floor, as opposed to one of the guest bedrooms up here and granted the privacy of the whole upper west wing?"

"Why, I believe it was easier for Mr. Smith to work. His room was directly next to the Professor's study, where the Professor keeps his journals and notes which were his job to transcribe."

A simple explanation, then. But it summoned another question, this one from me and stemming from a physician's frame of mind.

"Forgive the question if it seems prying, Miss, but as a doctor I can't help but wonder—if the Professor struggles so with his health and mobility, and there is a bedroom downstairs by his study, whyever hasn't he moved? Surely it would be practical, and indeed more comfortable, to relocate to the ground floor?"

Holmes lifted an eyebrow, turning to me precisely as I glanced to him, and I practically glowed within at the approval I found in his gaze.

"I wondered the same thing myself, Dr. Watson," Ms. Tarlton said, bright-eyed. "You have a logical mind, sir." In the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Holmes's face twitch. I was flummoxed myself: rarely was that word affixed to me, especially when I stood next to its paragon. "But evidently, it is a matter of pride. The professor, his strength wanes, but he is intent on remaining mobile, Doctor, even if he is not capable of walking down the stairs without Mortimer at his arm."

The answer did not resolve the real question that still gnawed at me: explanation for how the intruder could have ascertained where Smith was sleeping. Could she have spied him through the window? Holmes had noted the spent candle, could it have been bright enough to light the man's visage through the night rain? Or had the killer stalked his habits on the grounds beforehand at an earlier date, a premeditated habit? If that was so, why not bring a murder weapon? Why rely on finding such a knife in the residence, if murder was on the mind? 

I was at a loss for motive, as well, just like poor Hopkins; the evidence clashed with any explanation for murder I could think of. Why go to such lengths to murder a secretary? And why Willoughby Smith?

As my mind turned, the three of us were led into the Professor's room. It was a large chamber, as poorly lit as the rest of the house. Massive velvet curtains hung over impressive paneled windows, and the entire space was lined with bookshelves filled with innumerable volumes which overflowed to the floor in the form of scattered, miniature towers of literature. A kingly four poster bed was in the center of the room, and beside it, positioned in a wheeled chair in a slice of light by the bedroom window, sat Professor Coram.

The man was perhaps fifteen, twenty years older than myself. His short, fine hair was grey and making its way to white near his temples. His beard was clipped close to the face and the color of ashy snow, and a pair of silver, stout spectacles sat perched on the end of his long, red-tipped nose. The man wore an expression of weary misery on his lightly wrinkled face, and greeted us with a muted degree of welcome. His eyes, however, absorbed most of my attention: they were dark as coal behind his glasses, piercing above bruising, sleepless circles.

“Sherlock Holmes, sir. And my partner and colleague Dr. Watson.” Holmes stepped forward, tipping his head in greeting.

“Nicholas Coram. Your name is familiar to me, Mr. Holmes. You are welcome in my home, though I regret the business that brings you here.” Professor Coram coughed the cough of a lifelong smoker, phlegmatic and labored. He looked up to the maid, waving a hand, and as he did so I saw that the man’s nails were stained yellow with nicotine. Indeed, the entire room was fetid with the stale, cloying smell of tobacco smoke.

“Ms. Tartlon. In light of these events, I bid you take the day off. Mortimer has already gone to his family home to recuperate, child, I give you leave to do the same.”

“As you wish, sir," Ms. Tarlton said feelingly. "Thank you,” She curtsied and left us. I turned, watching her go, and looked back to see the Professor retrieve a polished cigarette case from beneath his blanket, which was wrapped around his legs from his chest to his shoes.

“Pray take a cigarette, Mr. Holmes, if you smoke.” Hardly one to turn down tobacco, my friend accepted, and I waved my hand when the same was offered to myself.

“I have these especially shipped from Japan,” said he, and I noticed as he spoke that his English had a curious quality, a foreign, mincing aspect that I could not place. “I order two hundred-case boxes at a time, and I grieve to say I have to arrange for a fresh supply every fortnight.” He rasped a laugh. “Bad, sir, very bad, but we all have our vices. Tobacco and my work, that is all that is left to me.”

Holmes lit his gifted cigarette and in the orange flare that bloomed in that shadowy room, I saw his grey eyes darting all around, undoubtedly absorbing data at a rate I could scarcely fathom.

“Such a shame that my work was interrupted this way, by such a tragedy,” Professor Coram said, voice thick with fatigue and regret. “Who could have foreseen it? And that such a catastrophe should have come to such an estimable young man…” He shook his head. “After some proper training he was an admirable assistant. Smart and hard-working, and detail minded. Could read my handwriting as well as myself, too, which was no easy task.” He craned his head at Holmes, brows coming together to form a troubled, whiskery mountain range. “Tell me, Mr. Holmes, what do you make of it? Have you any idea how my assistant came to such a fate? How such a blackguard could have entered my house and left it with barely a trace of himself?”

“I’m afraid I cannot say yet, Professor Coram,” Holmes said, and exhaled a plume of smoke through his thin lips. “But I assure you, I plan to investigate the matter thoroughly.”

“I shall indeed be indebted to you if you can throw a light where all is so dark to us,” said Coram. “To a poor bookworm and invalid like myself, such a blow is paralyzing. I seem to have lost faculty of thought! But you are a man of action—a man of affairs. I have read your biographer's stories. Such shocking events are a part of the everyday routine of your life. You have a soldier’s steadiness, and can preserve your balance in every emergency! I envy you, sir. But we are fortunate in having you at our side, Mr. Holmes, on the hunt for this foul brigand.”

As Coram talked, Holmes paced up and down about the room, smoking like a veritable steam engine. He sucked one to the quick and went back for a second and third while the Professor rambled, whipping up a regular pea-souper as he occasionally did in Baker Street on his more slippery cases. Perhaps the fresh Japanese cigarettes were a new favorite, but I did wonder if something else was driving him to distraction.

“It is a crushing blow,” continued Coram unhappily. “Young Smith was helping me on my magnum opus. It is my analysis of the documents found in Coptic monasteries of Syria and Egypt, a work which will cut deep at the very foundations of revealed religion. With my health as it is, I’m not sure I shall ever complete it, now that my assistant has been taken from me.” He blinked eyes that had glazed in the smoke now permeating the bedroom. “Dear me, Mr. Holmes. Why, you’re an even quicker smoker than I am myself.”

Holmes smiled coolly. “I am a connoisseur,” said he, taking yet another cigarette from the man’s proffered case. “I will not trouble you with any lengthy cross-examination, Professor Coram, since I gather that you were in bed at the time of the crime and could know nothing about it, correct?”

“Yes,” the Professor said wearily. At once, his countenance looked quite drained. “It was such a stormy night, and I have been a hard sleeper all my life. I slept through it all until I heard that shout, and even then, I’d doubted I had heard it at all.”

“I see,” said Holmes. “I have then only one question for you, sir. What do you imagine were the meaning of Mr. Smith’s final words?” My friend took a long draught from his cigarette, face unreadable through the smoke that curled languidly from his mouth. _“The Professor. It was she.”_

The Professor shook his head. “Susan is a country girl,” he said, waving a hand. “You know the incredible stupidity of that class. I fancy that the poor fellow murmured some incoherent delirious words, and that she twisted them into some meaningless message.”

I buried my own reaction to such a disparaging comment to the young lady, for it was nothing I’d not heard before from other men of the Professor’s standing, but for how little I knew Ms. Tarlton I could hardly say she was soft-headed. And having seen and held men as they died myself in war time, I knew all too well just how such traumatic memories could lodge themselves in one’s mind with terrible clarity.

Holmes, for his sake, looked unmoved. Still he circled about the perimeter of the Professor’s quarters, smoking like a Bristol chimney, but at a more sedate pace. “Ah. An understandable mistake to make under such circumstances, wouldn’t you agree? You don’t have an explanation yourself for this tragedy?”

“I find no reason in the crime that occurred last night, and it is precisely this lack of reason that makes me question the whole matter. I confess, Mr. Holmes, that I dread another explanation for this crime. Possibly…” The professor hesitated, and continued at the hushed register part and parcel to scandal. “It is possible, sir, that this was an accident. A suicide. Young men like Mr. Smith, they have no end of hidden troubles. Affairs of the heart, perhaps, which are never known to the rest of us. It is a more probable supposition, wouldn’t you say, than murder?”

“A valuable suggestion, Professor,” my friend replied. The end of his cigarette glowed, fire devouring vellum. “But what of the eyeglasses, then?”

“I am a mere academic, Mr. Holmes,” Coram said, waving his hand once more. “A man of dreams. I cannot explain the practical things of life. But love-gages, tokens, they can take strange shapes. A fan, a glove, glasses…who knows what article may be carried or treasured close when a man puts an end to his life? Inspector, you spoke of footsteps in the grass by the path here, but it is so easy to be mistaken. Such footsteps could easily have been Mortimer, managing our flower path earlier in the day. As to the knife, the lad had full access to my study…it might well have been thrown far from the unfortunate man as he fell after striking himself. I might have no knowledge of such things as crime and cruel twists of destiny, but to me it seems—however tragic it may be—that young Willoughby met his fate by his own hand last night.”

“Your theory is interesting to me, Professor,” said my friend. “Very interesting, indeed. I have much to ponder. I should prefer, by your leave, to go quietly down to your garden and turn the whole matter over in my head. We must apologize for having intruded upon you, Professor Coram, and I promise we won’t disturb you again until we take our leave.”

Suddenly, Holmes blinked with some rapidity, and I watched as he looked about himself with strange surprise.

“Ah, forgive me, dear sir,” he said, voice tinged with regret. “I seem to have trodden all manner of cigarette ash about your bedroom. Where does your housekeeper reside at this hour? The least I can do is ask her to clean up the mess I have so ungraciously made.”

My eyebrows lifted despite myself. Holmes created deserts of ash in our apartment with much less consideration to our dear Mrs. Hudson every week; as astute as my dear friend was, his courtesy to his environment often left much to be desired.

“It is nothing she does not see on the daily, my good man,” Professor Coram said dismissively. “But I appreciate the courtesy. My housekeeper resides in the cottage in the back of the manor. In light of the tragedy of last night, I have given her the day to calm her nerves.” He pressed his lips together, and those piercing eyes javelined towards my friend and eventually to me. “Pray, do not disturb her too much. She is an elderly woman and she has been much disturbed by these horrible events.”

“I will be on my best behavior, Professor. Thank you for your time. I hope to return to you with promising news.” My friend bowed his head in goodbye, and with the Inspector, we swiftly departed the room.

“Holmes,” I began, as the door was closed behind us.

“Hush,” my friend hissed. The diverted mood which had swept over him in the Professor’s quarters had been banished and replaced by an acute, single-minded mien. As though powered by one of Tesla’s voltaic electric coils he abruptly set down the east hallway, marching past the staircase and back several times. Hopkins and I watched, perplexed, as he opened the door to Ms. Tarlton’s quarters and entered her room.

“Holmes!” I whispered harshly, about to lecture him for the impropriety, but no sooner had I spoken had he emerged from the room, brow creased and lips pressed tightly together in thought. He opened the linen closet, peering inside, and then scoured the walls of the hallway with uncompromising consideration. Before I could ask what he was searching for, he snapped his fingers and looked up at me, radiant with a realization I could not begin to surmise.

“Come, Watson,” he said breathlessly. He drew close to me at the top of the stairs, his breath ghosting over my ear and sending goosebumps down my spine. “I must determine something. The cottage may hold the key to this.”

Hopkins and I followed his quick beeline down the stairs, around through the east hallway below, and out the back door by the study. The backyard was just as well manicured as the front, and not too far from the patio sat a small, if not quaint, brick cottage covered in thickets of green ivy.

“Holmes, what have you determined?” Hopkins asked, eyes bright with the possibility of newfound clues.

“I cannot say for certain,” Holmes replied. “It depends upon those cigarettes that I smoked. It is possible that I am utterly mistaken but—no, there is something there, and the cigarettes will show us the truth.”

“The cigarettes?’ I echoed. “How on earth—”

“You may see for yourself, Watson,” said Holmes, and gave me one of his rare, sincere grins, born of the thrill of the chase. My heart hammered at the sight of it, as it always did, true as the Westminster Chimes. 

From the cottage, we saw the door swing open and reveal an elderly maid with long, white hair piled upon her head in an intricate, if messy, bun. “Ah, here is the good Mrs. Marker. Let us enjoy five minutes of instructive conversation with her, yes? I have a few… _pressing_ questions.”

* * *


	3. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holmes draws a conclusion, and secrets come to light.

_chapter three_

I may have remarked before in my writings that Holmes can, when he likes to, have a peculiarly ingratiating way with women. That is to say, he can be exceedingly, devastatingly charming, and I feel for any creature he targets with such skill, as Heaven knows I would weaken under such a devilish talent, unsuspecting or no. For all that he avoids women, he has a singular talent for establishing rapport with them the likes of which—not to blow my own horn—I myself do not possess, despite my genuine experiences and interest in women the world over. Furthermore, he has a terribly appealing false smile, white and perfect, and his sonorous voice can level at near-hypnotic timbres. (It doesn't hurt, naturally, that my friend resembles a perfect statue of the Roman masters: marble-skinned, noble-featured, tall and lithe and well-dressed, with uncommon, ashen eyes that could transfix one's very soul. Yes, I pity any person he endeavors to charm. We are a hopeless lot, but we're only human, just the same.)

In half the time which he’d named, Holmes had captured the housekeeper’s goodwill, chatting with her as if he had known her for years, and soon she was inviting the three of us into her home for some tea.

“Yes, Mr. Holmes, it is as you say sir, he does smoke something terrible! All day and sometimes all night, sir, you’d thought it was a London fog on some days. Thank you for alerting me to the state of the Professor’s rooms, it does the man no good to live in conditions, with his health as it is.”

Mrs. Marker paused, her expression turning to sorrow. “Ah. Poor young Mr. Smith, he was a smoker also.” Her voice went weak and quivery at mention of the lad’s name. “Not as bad as the Professor, of course, but…with his health, I don’t know that it’s better nor worse for smoking.”

“Tell me, Mrs. Marker, did you notice anything strange about Mr. Smith’s behavior these last few days?” my friend asked.

The woman began worrying her wrinkled hands, upset. “Ohh, no. No, I’m afraid the young lad was as good-natured and hard-working as ever. He was—he was a good lad. A shame what happened. A shame, sir.” Her voice went thick once more with emotion, her dusty blue eyes shining with unshed tears. “…T’weren’t right, what happened to him. That anyone could hurt such a young man, it is, oh, it is an awful thing.”

“The Professor theorizes, madam, that young Smith was driven to take his own life,” Holmes said calmly. The woman blinked rapidly, startled, and her papery face lost what little color it could spare. One of her hands flew up to her neck, sealing over a modest cross necklace. “Did you observe evidence of such depression in his demeanor during his time here?”

“D-Depression? Ohh, oh no, Mr. Holmes, I—” The woman twisted her hands with increased anxiety, voice trembling. She took the chipped teacup before her with shaking hands, voice dropping to a near whisper. “Oh, how awful, but—but perhaps the professor is right. He—he did know the lad best, after all, and I know nothing of such sorrows in men…my own late husband—”

“Mrs. Marker,” my friend said, and there was a firmer quality to his voice that had me straightening over my tea. “Oblige my curiosity about the good Professor Coram. You have worked for him for many years now, yes?"

"Yes, going on six, sir."

"You entered his employ when he purchased the estate?"

"Yes, sir, my husband and I, we worked and lived here with the previous owners, oh, for nearly fifteen years before that. Lovely family. The master worked for the government 'til he was offered a position abroad. I had familiar experience with the upkeep of the place, and I was so opposed to leaving the house in which I'd lived all these years with my Harry, the good Professor offered to keep me on."

"I see. Tell me, madam, has the Professor ever been married?”

The woman’s teacup clattered in its saucer as it slipped from her shaking fingertips, spilling over-steeped tea across the scratched wood, and she began whispering frantic apologies. 

“I—oh my clumsiness, forgive me. This affair has my nerves so frayed, Mr. Holmes, oh.” Every drop of blood seemed to have fled from her face. “I—what did you ask me, sir?”

“The Professor,” Holmes said, and his voice was as deep and cool and unaffected as a frozen river. His eyes, however, daggered into the elderly housekeeper like a hunter who’d spotted his prey amongst the trees. “Was he ever married?”

“I—I believe so, yes,” Mrs. Marker said, and indeed, she looked decisively cornered. “I do think he was at one point, Mr. Holmes, but before my service to him. She passed away, oh, goodness, I believe it was a decade ago now? He—he does not speak of it readily, sir.” She attempted to soak up the spilled tea with a fetched terry cloth, but in her haste only managed to spread it about. “Pray, sir, why do you ask?”

“A man of his age and station, it is perfectly natural that he should have married, and yet I saw no wedding band on his finger,” my friend offered casually. “But I did notice, madam, underneath the stench of the good Professor’s tobacco the unmistakable scent of civet. A glandular secretion of the _Vicerra civetta_ , an African cat, distinct enough to cut through even the staunchest tobacco smoke—a distinct and exceptional _perfume,_ my dear madam, when paired with spice oil and ambergris.” An infernal curl stretched my friend’s mouth, as provocative as it was Mephistophelian. “I don’t suppose you own such a delicate fragrance, my dear woman?”

The woman’s constitution was ghastly grey, now, and her voice shook like a rattling train carriage. “I—I—heavens, perfume? I myself, oh, I don’t think—I do not own such—Per-Perhaps Miss Susan—”

“No, my dear woman, I’m afraid the lovely Ms. Tarlton uses a cheap but otherwise respectable bergamot extract. I don’t suppose you could account for such a scent? Is the Professor an aficionado of exotic fragrances as well as tobacco?”

“I—oh–” The woman swayed, shaking so hard she crumpled in on herself, and it was only my swift reflex that kept the woman from sliding out of her chair to the floor. I guided her steady and she began weeping pitifully, burying her face in her wizened hands. “Oh, Mr. Holmes! How could you…I cannot bear…”

“Inspector, if you could watch Mrs. Marker for but a moment,” said Holmes, moving to his feet. “Watson and I must check something within the household.” Bewildered but certain my friend had landed upon something if the housekeeper’s reaction was any indicator, I followed him out of the woman’s humble kitchen into her personal bedroom. Looking under the bed and within the woman’s cabinets, Holmes searched the room thoroughly before coming upon her bureau, opening the doors, and crying out in victory.

“Aha! We _have_ her, Watson!"

In the floor of the bureau, soaked in totality and dripping a modest puddle out of the door and onto the dirty floor, was a sodden violet dress—finer than anything else in the closet—and at its soggy hem was mud, deep brown and flecked with the tiny white petals of baby’s breath.

“My god, Holmes!” I cried, amazed. “The housekeeper? Truly?”

“Only an accomplice, my dear Watson, a player in a much larger deception. A deception that we shall see the pieces of more clearly when we speak again to the Professor. All shall be revealed, my dear man.”

We returned to the kitchen, where Mrs. Marker was shaking with silent tears, and shared our findings with the inspector.

“Good lord,” he said, taken aback. “You cannot mean to say that Mrs. Marker—”

“She did not act alone. Or indeed, act much at all. You’ll find, Inspector, should this woman regain the ability to speak, that it was loyalty that guided her, not the true motivation for this crime.”

With that, Holmes turned on a heel and faced the crying woman with ice in his features. “Mrs. Marker,” he said.

At the silence that met her, Mrs. Marker looked up through her fingers and shrunk in her seat like dying flower. “No, no, I cannot,” she said, sobbing quite pitifully now. “Please, Mr. Holmes. I could not, I could not!”

“I do not ask you to betray your employer, madam,” he said emotionlessly. “But I’m obligated to inform you it will be the only thing to save you from the noose.”

Mrs. Marker went rigid, a shocked and horrified breath stuttering from her lungs. “The noose,” she choked out. “The noose.” She closed her eyes, tears streaming down her face. She shuddered, paroxysms of horror.

“It would be what I deserve,” she breathed. “For my silence. For that young man. Oh, God in Heaven, I did not know. I would have—I did not _know.”_ She trembled, whispering prayers I had not heard since my youngest days as a child in church, clutching her cross.

“You assisted after the fact,” stated Holmes. “You had no knowledge of the plan to kill young Willoughby Smith.”

“No, no, I never, Mr. Holmes, I _never—”_

“I implore you, for your own sake, to consider testifying. It will be your only salvation, madam. Repentance, I’m afraid, must be found on your own terms.” Holmes turned to Hopkins. “Without drawing much attention, inspector, I would ask you to have one of your constables ready a carriage. Within the quarter hour, you should have the culprit in your hands, and they will require swift transportation to the nearest empty cell.”

“Within the quarter hour!"

“Less, if I am right. Go, Hopkins, and meet us in the Professor’s rooms as soon as it is ready. We will need your irons.”

Off went Hopkins and for a moment, Holmes looked at the wilted housekeeper. “Come, Watson,” he said. “She will not attempt to flee. Her guilt will hold her here.”

The two of us left Mrs. Marker and quickly left for the manor. We made up the stairs in short order and stopped right at the door, Holmes turning to capture my gaze.

“If I am right, we shall have our culprits, Watson,” he whispered. “I trust you have your service weapon, as always?” His face was craned close to mine, and our shoulders brushed together. I felt his presence like the warmth of a hearth, and my pulse quickened with excitement.

“As always,” I murmured. His closeness, his burning gaze, brought my heart to pound, battering against my ribcage.

"Then let us have them."

I am no poet. My abilities extend to prose and little more. But there, lurking by the Professor’s door, eyes glittering with the fire of the hunt, I thought—not for the first time—that Holmes looked immortal. A raven-haired Orion, lethal and calculating, stunning and mythic and the most cocksure creature on this earth. I would do anything he asked and follow him anywhere he went, and so I nodded, like I always did, the mortal enchanted by the demigod.

He looked at me with that light in his eyes, dancing as it did moments before apogee, and he opened the door.

Immediately, I saw that Professor Coram was not where we had left him. He was in his chair, still, but rather than by the window as before, he sat across the room near the one of his overflowing bookshelves, and he startled in his seat at our sudden entrance.

“I say,” he snapped, his bearded face flooding red with anger. “Your manners leave something to be desired, gentlemen!”

“I apologize, my good sir, for our rudeness,” Holmes said, striding in with the lordly confidence that never failed to make me warm beneath my suit collar. “But you see, I told you I would return to you with news, and so I have.”

Professor Coram’s mouth gaped open. With some agitation, he extracted his tin of cigarettes from his blanket. “Truly?” he cried, and though his mouth stretched in a smile his pallor was draining to a shocking, cadaverous white. “Well! Well, that is wonderful, Mr. Holmes. Pray, have you solved this mystery?”

"In fact, sir,” said Holmes. “I believe I have.” His granite gaze caught mine and flickered meaningfully to the floor, and looking upon the carpet, it was only my years of practicing a poker face as a doctor, soldier, and flatmate to the world's only consulting detective that kept my mouth from falling open.

“Indeed!” Coram said, too loudly. Something like a sneer quivered over his face, paired with eyes stretched far too wide. At that moment, Hopkins made his entrance, face ruddy.

“The carriage is ready, Mr. Holmes,” he said excitedly. “Now, are we to have your explanation?”

“We wait with bated breath, sir,” Coram said, white-knuckled hands fisting in his blanket. “When did you solve it? In the garden?”

“The final piece only just now fell into place,” Holmes said. I looked up from the floor and found myself staring at the Professor. More specifically, at his blanketed legs, and the shoes that poked out at the hem, and the dusting of cigarette ash on his loafers.

“I have forged and tested every link of the chain, Professor Coram, and I am sure that it is sound. What your motives are, or what exact part you play in this strange business, I am not yet able to say. But in a few minutes, I imagine I shall probably hear it from your own lips.”

“Is that so?”

All of the apprehension that had stiffened the Professor’s limbs had bled from him in the middle of Holmes’s statement. Now, he lit a cigarette with unsettling, masterful coolness. The end of his cigarette seared fire-red, and in its glow the piercing eyes that had once caught my attention now sent chills down my spine.

“And what draws you to such a conclusion, Mr. Holmes?” asked Coram, and his voice was a strip of gravel.

“Yesterday, a lady entered your study and took your knife from your desk, knowing it would be there. She entered Mr. Smith’s room with the intention to kill the young man, and to take something which resided in his desk cabinet. She stabbed him, and left the knife upon the floor. Despite losing her eyeglasses in the scuffle, she managed to shatter the bedroom window and flee towards the gate entrance. She managed this crime, sir, and managed the path in the dark, because she was familiar with this estate and the layout of its rooms. She was familiar with Mr. Smith and knew out of which of the guest rooms where he was staying. She also knew it would be safe, upon reaching the gate, to turn around and walk the path back to the house and around to the housekeeper’s cottage...where she knew, also, that she would be relieved of her soaking wet clothes and given time to wait for her opportunity to sneak unseen by others back into the house—and indeed, sir, into your room.”

The Professor scoffed, humorless and cruel. “You mean to say that I could lie upon that bed and not be aware that a woman had entered my room?” he asked, jeering. He exhaled smoke from his nose, a dragon in the dim bedroom light.

“I never said so. You _were_ aware of it. You spoke with her. You _know_ her. You aided her escape from the police.”

Coram’s face was cold, but the laughter that emerged from around his cigarette was far colder, ringing alarms deep in my marrow. “I see,” he said. “I see. You are mad, sir. I helped her to escape, you say? Then, where, pray, is she now?”

“She is there,” said Holmes, and he pointed to a high bookcase in the corner of the room.

The last flicker of life left the man’s visage and his face went entirely to stone. In an instant, there was the sudden thump and creak of hinges, and I gawked as one of the overfull bookcases alongside the bedroom wall swung open, and a woman rushed into the room.

“You are right,” she cried, eyes wild. She was pale and thin, a wraith in a red velvet dress, her black hair piled in a perfect braided crown upon her head. “You are right, _Mr. Holmes,_ and I am here.”

Her accent was thick and foreign, and I recognized in it the same inflections as the Professor’s. Her face, pristine with careful makeup, displayed the exact physical characteristics that Holmes had divined, but she was younger than I had imagined, closer in age to the Professor who looked upon her with what could only be devotion shining in his pitch-black eyes.

Immediately, Hopkins stepped forward and took her by the arm, reciting the prerequisite words of arrest and options for solicitation. With unexpected ferocity, she shook off his grip and tore something from a sewn pocket in her gown, lifting it to her face.

“Anna!” Coram bellowed.

“Stop her!” Holmes cried, bounding across the room, but before either he or Hopkins could make it, she held a small phial to her lips.

“Do not move, or I shall drink it all,” she hissed. The three of us froze. “I won’t be taken to your English prison. I will not!”

“You have no choice,” Holmes said. “But perhaps, if you explain your motives, you need not die there. You need not die _here_ , Mrs. Coram!”

“I owe you no explanation,” she seethed. Her dark eyes blazed with fire and a conviction I had not seen in an age, not since the war, not since the eyes of the Afghans who moved to mutilate us where we lay dying in the field. “I owe you _nothing._ And I will die before I let you take me in irons. You will let me walk out of here, or I will die upon this floor by my own hand and will!”

“Damn it, Anna!” Coram spat. “Don’t you dare!”

“ _Zemla e vola,”_ she said, through her teeth, but in that moment where she looked to her husband, Holmes lunged forward. He struck out his arm, quick as lightning, and she gave an outraged cry as the phial went flying through the air. In the next moment, Hopkins seized her properly by the arms, and she howled in indignation.

“For God’s sake, Hopkins, hold her!” Holmes said, reaching for the other arm as the woman buried her clenched fist in Hopkins’s chest with shocking force, doubling him over. From where I stood awe-struck at the woman’s energy, I saw movement in the corner of my eye, and when my eyes traced it to its source my heart suspended in my chest.

_“Holmes!”_

I rushed forward, intent to tackle the professor to the floor—anything to divert his intended aim—but the redirected steel barrel of a Webley stopped me dead in my tracks.

“Stop right there, Doctor Watson,” Professor Coram said, voice as sharp as a dagger. His gaze moved to my friend and the Inspector, who had turned to statues in shock.

Holmes was frozen, staring at the gun pointing directly at my chest.

“Release my wife,” Coram ordered, his voice steady. His nostrils were flared, eyes piercing with a rage that filled my stomach with ice water. “Release her, or I will fire a bullet directly into the good doctor’s heart.”

Holmes released the woman as if scalded. His face, once aglow with excitement, was now ashen.

Slowly, Coram moved to his feet. He did so effortlessly, without any sign of injury, the blanket wrapped around his legs falling to the floor. Hopkins gaped, stunned, but Holmes and I watched in silence, tense but unsurprised at the revelation. Holmes had suspected it, and I had seen the truth of it on the floor: in the ashes Holmes had left across the bedroom, there were shoe prints. Two pairs, a man's and a woman's. Coram was no invalid. His illness, or at least his immobility, was a deception.

It was proving to be a terrible truth now. Coram stepped forward, reaching out his free hand without wavering his aim. His wife, no longer frothing with rage, looked at him with adoration on her face.

“My darling,” Coram said. “You know better, than to try and leave this world without me.”

“I knew you would stop me,” she returned, voice low and confident. She took his hand with the gentleness of a lover. “I knew it. I just gave us the chance you needed.”

“You are a marvel, my beloved.”

The partners turned to face us, and the sight of them made my stomach sink in dread. There was a madness, glinting in their eyes. An intensity shared between them, born not just of devotion, but something deeper that I did not yet understand. The woman had nearly poisoned herself, nearly out of protest. _Zemla e vola,_ she had said, like a motto. The couple in front of us, they were more than what they seemed, and all the more dangerous for it.

I cursed myself for not drawing my service weapon when I had the chance. But I had seen that weapon, aimed at Holmes, and acted out of instinct instead of logic. It was no wonder Holmes scoffed at emotions. I could have disarmed the Professor without hesitation, if my mind hadn’t been paralyzed with horror.

“Inspector,” Coram ordered coolly, attention drawn away from his confederate wife. “Take out your handcuffs.” His black eyes narrowed. “Slowly.”

Hopkins’s expression flickered with defiance, but he was a better man than he was a swashbuckler, and so he followed the instructions, removing his irons from his belt.

“Hand them to Holmes.”

My friend took them with glacial slowness.

“Carefully, inspector, take out your service pistol and place it on the ground before you.” Grimacing, Hopkins complied. “Kick it over here.” He did, and without lowering his arm, Coram bent to take the gun with his free hand, tucking it into the back of his belt. His piercing eyes slid over to me. “You next, doctor. Your service pistol.” His lips curled into a grin that made the hairs on my neck rise. “Smith wasn’t the only fan of yours in this household.”

Chest full of lead, I gingerly withdrew my pistol and lay it carefully on the ground.

“Kindly pick that up for me, my dear.” Anna Coram took my gun in hand with an uncomfortable familiarity, pulling back the hammer with ease. I never left Baker Street without a full six rounds loaded in the thing, and now, I regretted my fastidiousness.

“Now,” Coram said. “If you would be so gracious, Mr. Holmes…put the cuffs on the good doctor, here.”

Holmes’s jaw was clenched, the skin of his face bloodless. Rigidly, he stepped forward, eyes fixed upon Coram with what could only be anger. It was a rare thing, to see such an emotion in Holmes’s eyes, but after all these years as his friend, I recognized it there. The automaton of my stories, the unfeeling machine, has always been a lie, and no one knew it better than myself.

“No sudden movements, gentlemen,” Coram warned.

Inhaling sharply, I lifted my wrists. Holmes, for a moment, dragged his glare from Coram to meet my gaze. The emotion I witnessed in that glance briefly caused my lungs to malfunction. Behind the outrage, his eyes were filled with what I could only call fear. Not for himself, but for me. It was unbearable.

Despite the intensity warring beneath still waters, he was achingly gentle as he clicked each cuff into place around my wrists, as if my hands were fragile things. In the second before he withdrew from me, his gloved thumbs skimmed across my knuckles. Reassuring. Steadying. A promise, but one I knew he could not keep.

My heart hammered in my chest like a war drum. We both knew what was coming. The three of us were hostages, now, and while one was practically blind without her glasses, both of our captors were armed. More pressingly, they wanted to escape without capture or threat of it, and so it was a matter of who, not 'if' one of us would be taken as collateral.

I prayed, with all of my being, that it would not be Holmes.

In the next moment, as Holmes stepped back alongside Hopkins, my prayers were answered.

“Inspector, Mr. Holmes,” Coram said. “Pray, step back in my wife’s bedroom. I’m sure you’ll find it most accommodating.”

For the most fleeting of moments, Holmes looked stricken. His hands constricted once at his sides, desperate for action with a ferocity I felt in my very bones. Just as quickly, the horror on his face was locked away, transformed into the passionless mask that served him best in the direst of circumstances.

“Coram,” he said. His voice was polished obsidian, reflecting nothing. "If you intend to escape from Kent with your wife alive, you will need an able-bodied hostage. The doctor’s leg is a liability you cannot afford.”

My stomach dropped like an anchor into the Thames. _No,_ I thought, with a vehemence that seized me like a clenched fist. _No, damn you!_ A physical tide of anger and terror rippled through me where I stood. Holmes could not trade his life for mine, I could not bear it, I could not stand by and lose him a second time. I would not survive it.

“You offer yourself instead?” Coram rasped a foul laugh, and in all its foolishness, my soul cried out in relief. “You are a celebrity, Sherlock Holmes. Your face is known across the entire country. No, you would make a very poor hostage. But no one will recognize the face of Dr. John Watson. More’s the point, Mr. Holmes—” In a swift motion faster than I thought him capable of, Coram moved behind me, grabbing my war-scarred shoulder in a cruel grip. The cool metal of a muzzle kissed the side of my neck. “He is the best leverage I could ask for.”

Across from me, murder rumbled across my friend’s face like distant thunder. Coram’s gun pressed deeper into my carotid.

“It is a shame your stories are so popular, Dr. Watson,” Coram murmured, a malevolent spectre at my ear. “For all that you claim to admire the man, you took no issue in publishing his greatest weakness for all the world to see. For a man meant to be a machine, you must mean quite a lot to him, to conjure the emotion that I see on his face now.”

I swallowed hard, cursing Coram and cursing myself. My own writing had made a pawn of me, and Holmes was to suffer for it.

Though he could not hear the poison Coram was whispering to me, Holmes’s eyes blistered with loathing. I sought his gaze, full of words I could not express— _I will be alright, don’t try anything foolish, I believe in you—_ and when we met eyes, the sentiment I found there made my heart go still. There, burning, was a determination and willpower that took hold of me, forging a covenant at my core made by the strongest faith I’d ever known.

 _I will find you,_ his eyes told me. _I will come._ And I believed, with every fiber of my being, that he would do it, or he would die trying.

“Try to stop us, and he dies. Attempt to delay any train from the Chatham station, and he dies. I see a single constable or plainclothesman from here to our final destination, he dies. Do you understand me, Mr. Holmes?”

“I understand.” His voice was a monotone.

“Do your great powers of observation detect falsehood in my word?”

He was taunting Holmes now, scorn seeping from his voice. My friend’s face was the Arctic, untouched ice.

“No.”

“Good,” Coram said. “Inspector—my wife, the Doctor, and I will be taking that carriage you offered. Thank you, gentlemen, for your patience. We appreciate your dedication, but I’m afraid our time here together must end.” His voice went black as pitch. “ _Move._ ”

With a reluctance that bled from their very limbs, both Holmes and Hopkins backed into the bookshelf doorway.

“Darling?” Coram said.

Anna Coram swept forward, and with an outstretched hand, triggered the mechanism which closed the door with the tugging of a false book. I could not bury the sweeping dread that took hold of me as that hinge began to draw closed with the heavy click of a winch.

For those few agonizing seconds, Holmes held my gaze, eyes fixed and steady upon my face. But as the shadow of the door passed over his features, sealing him away into darkness, his cold mask splintered. On the face of my dearest friend, I saw a fearfulness that would haunt me for the rest of my living days.

Then, he was gone, and Anna Coram was pulling a second book down alongside the first, a second mechanism that no doubt served to lock my friend and Hopkins inside. My heart turned to stone, and adrenaline replaced the ache in my blood. I felt a soldier’s steel pour into me, for now that Holmes was safe, I needed only survive.

“Come, Doctor,” Coram said, and his free hand dug ruthlessly into my arm. “We’ve a train to catch.”

I was roughly ordered downstairs, and I played up my leg as much as I dared, desperate to buy Holmes time to escape from that hidden room. I hobbled more than I walked, my cuffed hands clutching the bannister in a death’s grip, but Coram had little patience for my stalling.

“Move faster, or God help me, Doctor, Mr. Holmes will escape to find your corpse.”

The fear on Holmes’s face flashed once more in my mind, a brand, and I could not bear to imagine what his reaction would be to finding me dead upon the stairway. Gritting my teeth, I dropped some of the pained façade and marched out the door with the end of a barrel searing a hole in my back.

“Oi! Stop right there!”

The constable that had met us at the front gate had spotted us in his position up on the driver’s seat of the carriage, and I had barely opened my mouth to shout a warning when, in an instant, a gunshot exploded from behind me. The constable jerked in his seat and slumped, falling from the cab to the earth with a heavy and awful thump. My ears rang as the carriage horses shrieked and whinnied in alarm.

“Coram!” I hissed, whipping around to face him. “Damn it, you’ll pay for this!”

“Not as dearly as you will,” he replied. His revolver once again trained upon me, but I ignored it, making for the fallen officer. I froze, however, at the hammer of a gun click, the sound of another round entering the chamber. My bound fists clenched in anger.

“No time to waste,” Coram said, voice dripping with disdain for the man bleeding at our feet. “Get in the carriage, Doctor.”

I glared daggers at him, self-preservation restraining my growing outrage. I climbed stiffly into the carriage, pained to leave the constable where he lay.

“Watch him, my dear?” Coram asked, and with the hand not pointing a pistol at my chest, he gently lifted his wife into the car beside me.

“With pleasure, my darling,” she replied, and I soon found the muzzle of my own revolver buried into my side. “Behave, _doktor,_ and we might let you live.”

“I highly doubt that,” I replied, through gritted teeth. The careless murder of a constable without hesitation or remorse burned in me, filling me up with a furious defiance.

“You’re smarter than your written counterpart, then,” she said, smiling, and it was by and large the cruelest smile I had ever seen grace the face of a woman. “You are right. We cannot let you go.”

“He will catch you. Both of you will go to the noose for what you did to Smith. Surrender now, while you still can, and you and your husband might be given clemency.”

Her dark eyes twinkled and my gut twisted as a dusty, unkind laugh slipped from her lips. The carriage around us lurched as, with a shout, Coram whipped the horses and sent us hurtling towards the main road.

“We have just murdered a constable and kidnapped a veteran," Anna said, shaking her head. "There will be no clemency for us. We do not want it, regardless. As for your Holmes..." She laughed again, and I swallowed hard at the sound of it. It sounded like death, cracking and aged and careless. "You’re so certain of him. And yet, here you are.” She twisted her wrist, my revolver digging into my side. 

“It is almost disappointing," she said. "I expected more. Perhaps he is not as smart as you think.” Her painted lips stretched into a smile. “Or as he thinks. I wonder what he will think of himself tomorrow, when he fails to save you in the end.”

“That end may come faster than you think, Mrs. Coram,” I said. Pride in Holmes made me bold, bolstering my voice with righteous belief. “It often does, to people who underestimate him.”

“I have faced down tyrants and tsars, _doktor,_ ” she said, and there was a knowing to her that made her seem years older than she was. “And there are things that are much worse than death. Your prisons are nothing. Your punishments are nothing. Your friend is nothing, because my husband and I have faced the entire world and survived.”

“My friend could give the entire world a run for its money in stubbornness,” I said. My eyes flickered to the road ahead, and I saw we were approaching a stone bridge at the end of a curve, bracketed by thickets of trees. Past that, I remembered there was only hewn clearing before we reached the city limits, where I would have nowhere to hide and nowhere to run, and once in Chatham and on the train, my fate would be sealed.

I prayed to God and Mary watching over me, and I thought of Holmes.

I looked in Mrs. Coram’s eyes, adrenaline leaping in my veins. “And he says the same about me.”

We crossed the threshold of the bridge, jolting as wheels rolled from dirt to stone, and I took my chance. In the moment where the two of us jerked in our seats, I grabbed Anna by the wrist and jerked the barrel outwards. There was the thunderous blast of gunfire as she pulled the trigger, deafening me, and through the roaring in my ears I heard an unholy shrieking and suddenly, the world shook, rumbled, and tilted on its axis. I briefly experienced the sensation of falling, blinding cold, and then, in an ocean of numbness, nothing but darkness closing in.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you guys are alright with a cliffy until next week! XOXO
> 
> hmu @apprenticeofdoyle or comment down below if you like the story so far!


	4. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holmes gives chase.

_chapter four_

**_Holmes_ **

At the crack of gunfire, my world fractured into panic.

 _Watson_ was all my useless mind could manage, puerile pleading. _Watson, Watson, Watson—_

“Hurry, Mr. Holmes!” Hopkins cried over my shoulder. I hissed air through my teeth, desperately prying away the panel concealing the false bookshelf's door mechanism. My worthless hands shook, fumbling on a task I could manage blindfolded and lame at any other time, in any other moment other than the one I was in, when I needed most to act swiftly. My perfect, practiced faculties had deserted me and I cursed their betrayal, that I should be so abandoned when the most vital person on this earth depended on their powers.

Seething, I found the mechanism in the dark and seized it, twisting hidden cogs. Finally, finally, an entire minute after the shot that had rattled apart my adamantine control, the screech of giving metal gave way to sunlight and escape. I bolted from the room to the window. The sight of the carriage galloping down the road with Watson inside was bottled fear and lightning, paralyzing me for a fraction of a moment before I sprinted headlong for the stairs. Hopkins barreled after me through the front door.

“Wilson!” he cried, dashing to the constable that lay bleeding upon the dirt.

I could not afford him any attention. _Horse_ , I thought, mind perilously close to derailment. _I need a horse._ If they made it to the station, there would be no way to ensnare them without placing Watson at risk. I _needed_ to catch up to them enroute, it was Watson’s best chance—

I was running, faster than I’d ever run my life, pumping my legs like pistons out the door and down the hundred yards towards the main road. The Corams had no stables, my only chance— _minuscule, infinitesimal_ , Logic insisted, but for once I damned its sense—was passerby, and I had no time to lose, _Watson_ had no time to lose.

I reached the gates and my heart constricted in my chest at the sight of a postman on a single horse coming from the east, saddlebag thumping against the side of his mare. I was not a praying man, but I lifted up gospel to every deity of every culture than might be listening, and I sprinted towards him with my heart thundering in my ears.

“Police! Police business!” I rushed at him like a madman, unrecognizable shouts tearing from my throat.

“What the—”

Without a moment’s remorse, I unsaddled the man in a swift move, grasping his ankle and hoisting upwards. He squawked, pitching to the earth, and in moments I was astride and racing after the carriage like the devil’s hellhounds were on my trail. The horse heaved, breath high and thin under my desperate driving, and we wove around the tree-spattered curves, November wind spiriting the blood from my face and whatever warmth was left in my body with it.

We came upon a stone bridge, and at the wail of a horse in agony, I found I could still feel colder.

The carriage horses, with their tresses, were unmoored upon the bridge, one lame and screaming upon the arch. The right low wall of the bridge featured a crumbling hole that had not been there before, the end result of a massive, heavy object turning over and blasting through weak stonework.

Breathless with terror, I rode hard to the edge of the bank of the stream and felt a dagger pierce my heart. There, I saw the toppled carriage half submerged in the creek, and there I saw Coram, soaked to the bone, hands wrapped tight around Watson’s neck and forcing his head beneath the rushing water.

Fury launched me from the horse down the bank. My blood boiled as I dove for the professor's waist, hell-bent to rip him away from Watson and beat the very life from him. Coram, disadvantaged by his age and my surprise attack, crumpled beneath my assault, and the two of us splashed down into the icy stream. The water was like white fire, lancing shock deep into my bones, but the heat of my anger preserved my focus as I reared up and brought a furious blow upon the man’s cranium.

Coram blocked me with a raised forearm, but it cost him. He bellowed in pain and I took advantage, following the block with a savage strike to his unprotected chest. Coram gasped wetly, and my lips curled in victory at the crack of broken rib-bone. Wheezing, Coram crawled backwards in the low rapids as he struggled to find purchase to stand. His hand slipped on beneath the water and I advanced. He twisted, lifting the other hand to his hip to reach for—

I saw the metal of Hopkins’s revolver poking from the side of his belt. I lunged. Coram's face twisted in hatred, seeing my goal and attempting to beat me to it. I knocked his arm aside with one hand and the other darted forward, fingers sliding around the pistol grip.

I ripped it back, cocked the hammer, and aimed. Coram's expression dissolved into terror. Without hesitation, I fired one round each into both of his legs.

I relished the sound of his screams for the single second it took me to spin around, and my heart plummeted in horror.

Watson was beneath the water.

My cry of anguish echoed across the rocks. I dashed to his side, half throwing myself into the frigid water to heave him upwards. I dragged him by his bound arms up onto the bank, and his face, God in Heaven, his face was as white as death. I fumbled frozen fingers alongside his neck for a pulse, my hands and his skin numb with cold—I could not bear to feel nothing, to find _nothing_ but silence and failure and the death of the one I held most dear. 

_Wasting time, wasting time—_ air. Watson needed air, and if there was water in his lungs, it needed to be cast out. Frantic, I turned him on his side and struck him repeatedly at the lower back, desperate for him to cough. Limp silence met my efforts and panic slithered beneath my skin, reason disintegrating under impending and total grief.

“Watson!” I yelled, and my throat constricted, his name mangled in my mouth. His face was slack and his eyes were closed and he was—he was a still corpse in my arms, oh God, not my Watson, _no._

I could not accept this. I could not stop trying—my mind hurtled about, flying through memories of Watson’s medical journals I had carelessly thumbed through, reports of attempted drownings and their survivors, and—my heart seized—a flash of memory, a newspaper article five years ago, a doctor had tried to save a child who’d fallen into the Channel with a French technique. _Giving breaths._

Inclining Watson’s pale, clammy head back, I leaned in and pinched his nose, so any oxygen I gave him would go nowhere but his lungs. Then, quickly, I sealed my mouth over his and exhaled, breathing in through my nose, exhaled, again, again, feeling his chest rise beneath me.

“Come on, Watson,” I begged. My eyes were stinging.

I tilted him, struck his back again hard, twice, and moved him back to give him more breaths. I would give him my oxygen, I would give him anything, my life, my soul, there was nothing I would not give to have him breathe _,_ to have him _live_.

His mouth was motionless under mine, lips ice cold. My heart cracked.

“Breathe,” I choked. His beloved face was blurred in my vision, his Adonis features smeared and colorless. “You will not leave me, Watson.” My voice eroded, sand beneath waves that took my hope with them. _"Please_.”

He was still. Cold and soaked and white as bone. Chest unmoving. Watson was silent. The pain in my chest was unspeakable.

 _You failed,_ Logic whispered to me. My heart convulsed at its certainty, cleaving in two.

Watson's eyes were closed.

_You failed him._

Gone. Watson was dead. I could not bear it.

I could not live with this. I could not live without him, could not live with my having failed him so utterly. I pressed my mouth over his, tears slipping down my face, and gave Watson my air, wishing to Heaven that I could give the life within my traitorous body to the only man my heart beat for.

I breathed into him, giving my everything too late, and when my lungs were spent I collapsed upon him, shuddering. _Watson. Watson_. I could not breathe. How could I, when he had taken the last of my life with him?

Despair swallowed me, and then, in my arms, Watson spasmed to life.

“Watson!” I gasped, as he sputtered and coughed in my embrace, his cuffed hands flying up as his body contorted to eject the water in his lungs. His spine rent upwards and I tilted him sideways, and water, petrifying gouts of it, gushed from his mouth.

“Breathe, Watson, breathe!”

He gasped for oxygen against the biological imperative to rid himself of the liquid in his body, and his bloodless lips frightened me. I struck him hard once, twice on the back, and he sputtered the last of it out. Then, as he sucked in great lungfuls of air, I took his precious face in my hands.

“Watson,” I whispered. Disoriented, watery eyes met mine, and the sight of them imbalanced me. _There_ was blue, those spring-sky shades I had grieved the loss of. I practically gave way, slumping half on the bank and on top of him, and I found myself pressing my forehead against his.

 _"Watson."_ His body beneath mine seemed to fill me, solder every crack that had splintered in my mind. He was all but ice, yet through the contact of skin I could feel his pulse, frenetic but true, and I grounded myself in his living, gusting breaths against my face. His bound hands fisted in my collar, clutching me like a lifeline as he drew in needy gasps, and I closed my eyes, grateful tears pooling at the bottom of my eyelids.

“H-Holmes,” he rasped, voice tattered, and the sound of his voice saying my name was more beautiful than any of Beethoven's symphonies. I hushed him with a new and fragile gentleness, my hands moving to grasp his and keep the both of us whole.

“It’s alright, Watson," I said. "I have you. I have you.” I pulled back, and saw that his eyes were heavily unfocused, his eyelids fluttering. “Watson?”

He had slipped away into unconsciousness, but his breathing was level. Exhaustion had taken him, and I swayed where I knelt in the mud as its power took hold of me in kind. I squeezed his bound, icy hands in mine, pressing my mouth to his frozen knuckles. My own eyes slipped closed, mind reeling at what I had so nearly lost and marveling what had been returned to me. My Watson would live. He would live.

“Mr. Holmes! _Mr. Holmes!”_

The sound of galloping hooves and Inspector Hopkins dragged me forcibly to the situation at hand, and whipping my head around, I quickly took stock. Coram was unconscious, having dragged himself to the bank and passed out from the pain. _Pity,_ I thought, my hatred jagged at its edges. It would have been exact justice had he fainted in agony and drowned, unable to lift himself from the same watery grave he had tried to deliver Watson into. I still had half a mind to finish the job, but no force on earth could have compelled me to release Watson from my grip, not even revenge.

Mrs. Coram lay closer to the bridge, unmoving on her stomach and half swept into the creek. I saw her thin breathing and the blood pouring from the crown of her head, and cared little.

“Good God!”

I jerked my head up to see Hopkins staring horrorstruck at the scene—the Corams bloody and unconscious, and Watson waxen and limp in my arms.

“Holmes! Dr. Watson—?!”

“Needs medical care as soon as possible!” I hollered up at him. “Go to town for a doctor, as fast as you can!”

Hopkins raced off on his newfound horse. I dragged Watson further up the bank, away from the water that had nearly stolen him from me, and gathered his freezing body in my arms, holding him as gently and as reverently as one held the most treasured thing in their world.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ik it's short. :) not sorry lads. (i am petrified of writing Holmes's POV. who knows if i did it any justice.) 
> 
> tysm for all the kudoses! next week is the penultimate chapter and absolutely brimming with pining, so stay tuned <3 leave a comment if you like the story so far, it means a lot <3


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watson returns to consciousness.

_chapter five_

**_Watson_ **

Later, I awoke to the sensation that my lungs and throat had been scraped raw by a paring knife. My pulse thundered like an unholy drumline in my head, sending lancing pain into my skull. Groaning awake, the sound rasping from my throat, I clenched my eyes shut. God in Heaven, it was worse than any bottle-ache I’d ever experienced. My very eyes throbbed in agony with every heartbeat.

“Watson—” 

I felt a feather-light touch upon my hand, and immediately I recoiled, flinching back. The touch disappeared and reason percolated through the sudden fear that had seized my limbs. I opened my eyes, cheeks flooding with embarrassment at my reaction.

“Holmes,” I croaked. The sight of him was like the floor falling out beneath me, plummeting relief. “Holmes, I’m sorry—”

“Apologize once more to me, Watson, and I will have no choice but to leave this room immediately and find someone more deserving to release my anger upon."

“Holmes,” I said. I could not help but sigh his name, too exhausted to laugh, but I settled for a weak, if grateful smile. “I’m glad to see you alright.”

Not unkindly, I looked at him and thought he looked terrible. His face was pale as a sheet, though not the fearful chalk-white from before, and his eyes looked cavernous over deep, sleepless circles. Sitting in a chair at my bedside, he seemed gaunt, and my heart twisted in my ribcage to think of him lingering there, likely going without sleep or food until I woke.

My friend’s eyes had closed, his dark eyebrows crashing low.

“…My dear fellow,” he said quietly.

I was certain, could see it on his face and hear it in the tone of his voice, that he was going to apologize to me for something ludicrous, like not having seen the future before it happened. I had no patience for it.

“You saved me, then,” I said, speaking slowly so as not to tax my tenderized throat. “I knew you would. Didn’t doubt it for a moment. I assume you caught my kidnappers as well?”

“Watson.”

My consoling smile faltered. Holmes’s voice, normally as steady as the tide, was suddenly fragile. His eyes opened to meet mine, and I was gutshot by the gloss of them, the anguish residing in their grey confines.

“Holmes,” I breathed. I reflexively reached out for him, but grasped only air. My friend did not take my outstretched hand. He just looked at me, features broken like a man upon the rack. “What’s happened? What’s wrong?”

Holmes barked a laugh, and it was a wretched, watery thing. “And you ask me what’s wrong. Of course, you try to comfort _me,_ when I have no need of empathy and you are the injured party _."_ His lip curled in a sneer, the crude, ugly kind fetched from his blackest moods. “You stand among the most compassionate of men, Watson. And look what’s come to you.”

“I don’t understand—"

“I…” The masterful control that so marked his countenance faltered, cracks splintering through fine china. The caustic quality that had slipped into his tone disintegrated entirely, and when he looked up at me, his eyes glittered in the low gas light. 

“My dear Watson..." he said, voice coarse with emotion. "I am so sorry."

My mouth fell open. “Holmes,” I began, appalled.

“I should have warned you better. I should have anticipated the pistol. I knew they were dangerous, I was a _fool_ to rule out the possibility of a ranged weapon just because Smith had died by a knife. I _knew_ what they were, but I sent you into danger practically blind just to cater to my _insufferable_ theatrical whims _—"_

“You couldn’t have known,” I began to insist, and he cut a hand through the air.

“No,” he said, through his teeth. My certain, collected friend trembled before me, vibrating steel. “It was my failure, Watson, and you will damn well let me own it. I cannot tolerate your forgiveness, your nobility, not when you don’t realize what—” His voice snapped, like a broken leather cord, and he swallowed. I watched, drowning in concern, hand aching for his. I had never, in all our years, seen him so distraught.

“I was almost too late,” he said, voice raw. Agony split across his face, cutting me in a scimitar’s blow. “He had you beneath the water.”

“You got there in time,” I said softly.

“I _did not._ ” His voice was a sharp knife in a shaking hand. “I did not. I- I dragged you from the brook, but—” Words cut off, were reformed rattled and low. “You would not _breathe_.”

“Holmes,” I whispered, heartsick.

“I beat upon your back. Gave you my air. You would not breathe, even when I—” His voice cracked, and his shining eyes went unseeing, fixed on some distant nightmare. “You had no pulse. I believed—I thought you were—”

I could bear it no longer. I leaned up, despite the screaming protest from my thrice-damned shoulder, and reached across the arm of my hospital bed once more for his hand. He allowed me to take it, and I squeezed it hard to drag him back.

“Holmes,” I said, adamant. “I would not be here if you hadn’t come for me.”

“If not for me, you wouldn’t be here at all.”

“I’ll hear none of that,” I said, with sudden vehemence, and finally, he looked at me, eyes haunted but present, fixed to mine. “You saved my life, Holmes.”

He opened his mouth, no doubt to say something else uncharacteristically foolish, and I cut him off. “And if my memory is correct, you even tried to give yourself in my place.” I squeezed his hand once more, remembering how frightened and angry I had been in that moment. “I could have strangled you for that, you know.”

“I do,” he said quietly. "But I'm afraid I would do it again. Without hesitation.”

“Because you are a good man,” I said, and he closed his eyes again. Faintly, I thought I felt his hand just squeeze mine in return. “The best man I’ve ever known. A man I’m happy to follow, that I trust rightly with my life. For all your powers, you cannot see the future, Holmes. You can only observe and react to the present. You saved my life. So you will accept my thanks, and in return—” He looked back up at me, vulnerable enough to snarl my heartstrings, “—I will forgive you for trying to pass yourself off as a hostage in my place. It was terribly rude.”

A weak, wonderful chuckle burst from my friend’s lips, and at last the despair ebbed away from his fair features.

“Lean back, my friend,” he said, his voice regaining its strength and discipline. “I can see you shaking from the effort of leaning up. Lay _back,_ my good doctor.”

All too willing, I slumped limply back to rest, releasing his hand. I sighed as my muscles sank into the mattress, bone-weary, and focused my gaze on the darkened window across the room.

“What time is it? How long have I been asleep?”

“Some twelve, thirteen hours. It will be morning soon.”

“Holmes,” I said, shaking my head. “Is it too much to ask that you slept at some point?”

His resulting eyebrow told me precisely what the answer was to that, and I couldn’t help the fond, exasperated smile that tugged at the corner of my mouth.

“Mycroft has already telegrammed to lecture me, my dear fellow,” he said. “But I was exactly where I needed to be.” And what could I say to that? Nothing wise.

“So?” I said, as soon as my heart stopped thumping.

He tiredly tilted a head in my direction, warmth in his eyes. “Hmm?”

“Holmes. The _mystery._ The Corams. Tell me everything.”

He smiled, finally, in earnest. And after such a rare display of his consideration for me, more proof than I ever needed that I held a place in his affection, I believed I could identify fondness, too, in the curve of his mouth. 

“I don’t possess all the pieces,” he admitted, with uncommon modesty. “I suppose I could have interrogated the couple in their cells for the details, but I had somewhere more important to be.” My chest lurched with affection at the reminder he'd deemed my welfare more important than satisfaction with a case.

“...But you do know most of it,” I pressed, burying the sudden longing that rose up in me. I shifted in my repose, face twisting in discomfort as my leg twinged, and my friend frowned at me.

“Perhaps you should get some more rest,” he said. “The truth can wait until the morning.”

“Bollocks to that,” I harrumphed, and he threw back his noble head to laugh, caught surprised by my poor language. I would utilize every curse in my repertoire if it kept him in good humor, and it was quite lengthy after my time in the army.

“I’ll sleep later. You’ll tell me now.” I lifted an eyebrow. “Unless you’d like to go home and rest yourself, then I suppose I’d be amenable.”

“Now it is, then,” said Holmes, and I smiled in victory.

“The Corams. I want to know everything. But first, I have to ask—how on earth did you catch up to us?”

Holmes cleared his throat. “Ah. I...acquired a horse.”

“However did you manage that?”

The faintest of blushes bloomed in my friend’s alabaster cheeks. “I…may have unseated a postman.”

I stared at him, and then immediately burst out laughing. It hurt something awful but I could not stop, and through my wheezing I heard him dissolve into boyish, deviant giggling.

“Poor lad,” I choked out. “Did he hit the ground hard?”

“I didn’t bother to look,” Holmes confessed, and that set us off on another round again, and by the end of it tears were streaming down my face and my throat was on fire, my head pounding at brutal tempo. My schoolboy snickering devolved in coughing, and the humor slid reluctantly from my friend’s face.

“Some water, my dear fellow?” he asked gently, and I nodded gratefully, privately touched by his consideration. In moments, a glass was in my hand, passed to me by thin fingers. I swallowed the liquid, graceless and wincing, and I noticed Holmes’s gaze, tracking my throat. 

“I’m alright, Holmes.”

“The marks on your throat tell a different story, Watson,” he said tonelessly. Automatically, my fingers moved to my abused throat, and I grimaced, the vaguest of memories flickering through my mind of pressure and darkness. Luckily, I had little recollection of the horror which Holmes had described. I would likely have bruises for a few weeks. 

To the shadowed expression on my friend’s face as he followed the probing of my fingers, I found I had little to say that I had not already. It was not his fault. The man who’d put them there was in chains. I was alive.

“Tell me the tale, Holmes,” I prodded kindly, his heavy gaze a weight on my heart. If I could not convince him now, then I would divert him. “How the blazes did you know Coram had a hidden wife in the walls?”

The edge of his thin mouth twitched. “It was elementary, Watson. Simplicity itself, after the pieces made themselves known to me. Once I point them out, you’ll see it was no large deductive leap.”

“Undoubtedly,” I said, smiling crookedly. “But that is what you always say, and your abilities never fail to impress.”

Holmes essayed a small smile. “And as always, you flatter me. I will tell you all, then. You shall be gratified to know that your observation once we arrived was crack on the beam. In order to know where in the manor Smith was residing, to navigate the interior of the house, and to take the wisest footpath to the gate, one required an intimate, undeniable knowledge of the premises. More to the fact, the motive which so eluded our inspector Hopkins hinged on the killer entering Yoxley Old Place to commit murder.”

“Not to take what was stolen from the lad’s drawer?” I asked.

“A component, Watson, but not the whole truth. What precisely was taken, I regret to say I don’t yet know. We may never learn it.” He pressed his lips together. “It is unlikely Coram will speak to me. As for his wife, she has not yet woken from her comatose state, and may never do so.” 

Holmes’s gaze drew to the floor, the smoke of his eyes darkening into midnight smog.

“Smith...wasn’t killed for what lay in his drawer?” I ventured, hesitant. “But the scrapes...”

He shook his head. “If motive for the crime had been merely to obtain an object in his possession, the Corams could have taken it at any point using much less drastic measures. No, his death—his silence—was the point of it. The object, whatever it may have been, was merely a loose end they needed to resolve.”

Holmes weaved his fingers together. “Observing the scene of the crime, it was clear that his death was not accidental. But premeditation challenged me, laid against the murder weapon. I could not fathom why a killer would make a move on their victim without a prepared weapon on their person beforehand. Even someone who had been familiar with the estate would not have relied upon finding a knife such as the one in the study to do the deed, it would have been too risky.”

“So you concluded it must have been someone not just familiar with the layout of the estate, but someone directly from within. Someone who knew exactly where to find the knife, that it would be there.”

“Not quite yet, Watson. I had no evidence to support such a theory, and you know my position on speculation without facts. But...it was increasingly likely, as you pointed out Watson, that the murderer was closer to the manor than any stranger or possible enemy of Smith’s from outside of it. The broken window, that was another intriguing piece to the puzzle—whyever would an intruder, a lady at that, decide to smash a window and flee through it, as opposed to departing the way she came? She certainly had the time to go back through the back door. No one in the house was certain of Smith’s cry, and Ms. Tarlton did not come running until after the window was broken.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, understanding the implication. “It was done to add to the impression of an outsider." Someone familiar with the manor would have snuck back out carefully, but the window...it implied an impulsive act by a stranger who needed to flee the scene of a crime. In the heat of the moment, I supposed I could understand why Mrs. Coram would have thought it a possible camouflaging element to her identity. "But however did you deduce she was a _resident_ of the house, Holmes?”

“I’m getting there, my dear fellow. Recall the layout of the manor.”

I frowned through my headache, squinting in memory. Heaven knew where my notebook disappeared to; it was probably ruined at the bottom of some damnable creek in Chatham. “Two wings. The ground floor...the kitchen was along the back. The Professor’s study, Smith’s guest room, and the sitting room were on the east side, and the west side was being renovated. The upper floor...the west wing was all guest rooms, and the east...Ms. Tarlton’s room, and the Professor’s. Holmes, I remember you examining the upper floor but I don’t—”

“Watson, there were simply not enough rooms in the upper east wing. A bedroom, the sitting room and that massive study below, and only two rooms and a linen closet above? I knew the moment we entered the professor’s room that it was not large enough to account for the difference in area from the ground floor. I inspected Ms. Tarlton’s bedroom and the linen closet to confirm the theory. There were nearly three meters in the hallway unaccounted for within the floor plan.”

“Remarkable,” I said. “It is indeed obvious, once you finger it. But...that it was his _wife?"_

“A logical assumption, in part concluded from the Professor himself.”

“Ahh,” I said. “The perfume.”

Holmes pressed his lips together, an edge twisting in a mischievous smile. “That, my dear Watson, was a fabrication. England’s best bloodhound could not have detected anything but the stench of tobacco in _that_ room.”

“A fab—there was no perfume? No civetta scent?” I exclaimed. “My word, you certainly had me and Mrs. Marker going. You were so specific!”

“As designed. Specificity, my dear Watson, can be a convincing element for deception.”

“But then what...”

“We knew from the pince-nez that our murderer was a woman, and an older one at that. But before I could begin to guess at her identity, what first alerted me to the idea of foul play on part of the professor was his cigarettes.”

“The cigarettes? Japanese, he said.”

“Japanese _imported,_ my dear fellow,” Holmes said, with simmering triumph in his eyes. “ _Russian_ leaf. You know how I pride myself on the identification of tobacco leaf and ash. The cigarettes were Sobranie. Combined with the photographs of the Ural mountains in the ground floor hallway and Coram's peculiar vocal tic, I determined he was Russian himself.”

“... _Zemla e vola,"_ I echoed, Anna Coram’s fanatical face in my mind.

“Land and liberty,” Holmes said gravely. 

_I have faced down tyrants and tsars,_ she’d said. “My god, Holmes,” I said, eyes wide. “Nihilists. The both of them.”

“Yes,” Holmes said. “And wanted in their home country for crimes of terrorism, treason, and arson, Scotland Yard has learned.”

“My god,” I said again. Not just murderers, but terrorists, wanted in Russia. No wonder she had scoffed at the idea of our prison system. I knew little of that part of the world, but rumors of Russian gaols did not so easily leave the mind. “They... _she,_ Mrs. Coram. She was frightened, Holmes, but not of us. Frightened of being caught, and willing to die before it could happen.”

“And willing to kill,” he confirmed, grim-faced. “Somehow, Willoughby Smith began to suspect something. Or the Corams believed that he did. They killed him to protect themselves from the long reach of the Russian police.”

A moment of silence as I absorbed this information, and I shook my head in disbelief. Such a secret, in so unassuming a country manor. I was beginning to truly understand Holmes’s weariness of the foggy lands outside London’s borders. “So you determined that Coram was a Russian nihilist by his art and his cigarettes?”

“Nothing so definitive,” Holmes said. “I knew he was Russian, and seeking to hide it. That he had recently come to this country, and that he could not have killed Smith alone. I observed some unusual wear on his shoes for a man so frail he could not walk downstairs without assistance...and made to confirm my hypothesis that he was not, indeed, invalided at all.”

“So you dashed ash all across his carpet, and left him alone to reveal himself. And caught two pairs of pacing footsteps in the process.”

“Precisely. Meanwhile, I required proof. I went in search of wet clothing, which I knew had to exist if Coram was complicit and, by proxy, had a close accomplice. Observing the hallway, I hypothesized that there was a hidden room attached to the Professor’s bedroom, but such a deception...it could not have been maintained by the professor alone. A living person, hidden in a home for years? She required meals, transportation to town for her needs—like, perchance, optometry. All these were things the Professor could not have provided himself without giving something away.”

“So you suspected the housekeeper.”

“Ms. Tarlton was too young and too earnest to have known the truth. And she cared too much for the young Smith. Besides, while in her room, I checked her boudoir.” He ignored my noise of disapproval. “Mrs. Marker, as she said, had been attached to the manor since before Nicholas Coram purchased it. She would have known, at least, that another room existed, or at least that renovation had occurred to obscure the presence of one. Thus, I surmised she had a role to play, and that we might find evidence in her apartment. If the murderess was on the premises, she would have been soaked to the bone making her false trail to the gate and back again. She would have been pressed to dispose of her wet gown somewhere out of sight. Mrs. Marker had her own cottage, and space in which to hide the frock.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “And the hidden door?”

“Shared the correct wall. I do hope you trust in me to identify false books when I see them, Watson.”

“I would never doubt it.” 

Holmes sighed heavily, settling back in his chair with the satisfied relaxation of an interesting case solved and explained to completion. I bit the inside of my cheek, hesitant to disturb the repose that had finally embraced my tired friend. But I had to know the full truth.

“And after?” I asked quietly. “What happened then?” 

Holmes tensed in his chair, face going still and seamless like an unbroken sea.

“After you were taken?”

“Yes.”

“I knew there must be a mechanism to unlock the room from inside. I found a panel in the dark, and reversed it to release us. Eventually.” He bit out the word, but swallowed hard. The stillness returned to his face. “I knew time was of the essence. I ran down the stairs, past the injured constable—”

“Wilson,” I said, jumping in my bed. “Good lord, I’d nearly forgotten. Is he alright?”

“He suffered a gunshot to the left shoulder. Through and through, with no arteries struck in the process. He will be fine. Hopkins sent for a doctor to aid him as well, after you were attended to.”

“Good,” I said, leaning back with relief.

Holmes just looked at me for a wary moment, looking so exhausted and hollowed out that I had half a mind to tell him to go home, and explain the rest later. But perhaps, it would be better to speak of it now, and get the entire affair over with.

“I made it to the road. I saw the postman and appropriated his mare. We chased down the path to Chatham, and I found the horses unmoored upon the bridge.”

“I took advantage of the jostling on the bridge to knock Mrs. Coram’s aim aside," I explained. "The gun went off, and when the horse fell, we overturned.”

Holmes’s gaze had drifted from my face to my collar and gone unseeing, his penetrating attention closing behind an invisible wall. “I raced to the bankside. I saw—I saw Coram, standing over you. I...flew at him, with the intention to kill him where he stood.” 

Cold water filled my stomach like a flooding cellar. 

“I had the advantage of him,” Holmes said woodenly. “I knocked him into the water and liberated Hopkins’s gun from his belt. I fired two bullets into his legs to keep him from escaping while I reached for you but...” Blood departed Holmes’s face, and all volume left his voice. “...I confess, Watson. I also shot him because I wanted to.”

My breath caught. “Holmes...”

“If you had died in my arms upon that bank, if he’d succeeded, I would have finished the job,” he whispered. “I would have sent him to Hell for it, Watson.”

“You would not have,” I said firmly, but my heart was thudding hard and heavy in my chest. “You believe in _justice,_ Holmes. You are a _good man._ ”

“You’re a better one,” Holmes said. “And he would have killed you.”

“You saved my life,” I said. I would say it over and over again until he heard it. “And you are no murderer.”

“Perhaps not,” he said. “But that may not always be true.”

“It most certainly will, as long as I am here,” I insisted.

He merely looked at me, silvered eyes stirred with a feeling I could not name. I felt something in my chest quiver in the silence that stretched between us.

“You don’t need me to be a good man. You were before we met.”

“Regardless,” he said quietly, almost too quiet to hear. “I cannot say with certainty that I will be after you’ve gone. But that is my burden to bear.”

“After I’ve—” My voice broke off, and a frightening thought took hold of me, plunging me into anxiety. _“_ Holmes, what—” 

Holmes stood, and the world hung about his shoulders. Emotion had been shuttered away from his features, a cool mask in place, and though it was familiar the sight now filled me with apprehension. “I’m going to leave you to rest now, Watson. I could use some sleep myself. Sustenance, even, if I dare wake our landlady in coming home. I will see you tomorrow.”

He turned his back on me, and I sat up in my bed. “Holmes.”

“ _Rest,_ Watson,” he said, and when he turned back to look at me, he was almost returned to normal. But his small, reassuring smile did not touch his eyes, and my heart snagged at their flat, emotionless deception. “I will return in the morning.”

I wanted to demand that he stay. To insist he tell me all that worried him so that I could erase it. But he had already revealed so much of himself in front of me this evening, so much of what he strove daily to repress. How could I give him anything but space? We had been through an ordeal, both of us, and he needed to collect himself. I owed him that, at least, and it was selfish to want more, to hound after his sentiments and attend to his pains when it was clear he could not bear to demonstrate them to me, and could not tolerate their existence within himself. 

_It is guilt, but it will pass_ , I tried to tell myself. _He will realize it is not logical to blame himself, and he will be well. He just needs rest, and time, and the privacy to center himself._

“...Until tomorrow, Holmes,” I said weakly. He lifted his hand, waving without turning back to me, and my throat constricted once more. I wanted more than anything to respect his wishes, but I was compelled that he know. That he understand I was grateful. That he not return to our home blaming himself for failure and crawl into a needle.

“Holmes,” I said, and he paused at the door. I swallowed away the stone in my throat, along with any other words I wanted to say. “Thank you.”

A moment of silence, and the proud slope of my friend’s shoulders tented as his head bent. But his back did not turn. His chin twisted only enough to speak, a chiaroscuro profile in low gas light.

“Sleep well, Watson,” he said quietly. And then he was gone, leaving me alone with exhaustion in my bones. 

But for all that I ached, sleep would not find me swiftly.


	6. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Watson goes home, and things come to a head.

**chapter six**

To my relief, my physician was easily swayed to release me on my own recognizance into Holmes’s care the following morning. I doubt I could have been convinced to remain in the damn place even one more night—it is true that doctors make the worst patients on this earth—but it would have done me no discernible good to sleep off bruises and strained muscles in a hospital rather than the comfort of my own home.

Luckily, bruises and strained muscles were the extent of my injuries. My neck and collar were a ghastly sight, as was the entire right side of my body where I met the shallow rockbed of a freezing cold brook, but otherwise, I had not broken a single bone. I ached, however, rather miserably, and desired nothing more than my own bed, a bit of whisky, and Baker Street. 

I had been unable to sleep the night before. The interaction between Holmes and myself played over and over again in my mind without fail, painting itself on my closed eyelids. I could not forget how rattled my friend had been. The guilt in his eyes, the regret in his slumped shoulders haunted me. His parting words dogged me most of all, twisting my stomach into a Gordian knot.

In the morning, Holmes came as promised. Unbearably, he appeared completely normal after last night’s conversation, almost as if it had never occurred at all. It set off warning chimes in my mind, telling me all was not normal no matter how opaque the glass behind Holmes’s eyes appeared. His gentleness in helping me into the hansom so I did not jostle myself was subtle, but not subtle enough to me who knew him so well. Neither was his lingering gaze on my collarbone, which glared with livid red bruising that had grown even more pronounced overnight. No, all was not well with my friend, but I did not prod him on the way home. Nor did I speak much at all to him, other than asking or denying assistance as we made our way finally to our sitting room, and soon I had lost the chance. After a perfunctory inquiry about my needs, to which I told him I was fine to sit and catch up on our post for a time with a cuppa, Holmes had disappeared to his rooms and left me alone. It was further evidence for my concern that he did not linger. The conclusion of a case usually left Holmes in the most resplendent of moods: it was then that he reached for his violin and played his sweetest music, that he insisted we treat ourselves to dinner out or a live performance, that he could be most easily pressed to indulge in sweets and snifters and laughter.

Holmes only sought isolation when the company of others grated at him, or when he faced a problem that required absolute silence to disseminate. We had no case, so it left only the former. I did my best not to let the fact wound me.

I was digging my way through the new post with bored bad-temper, feeling somewhat sorry for myself, when my eyes tripped over a familiar name amidst the ocean of letters and telegrams. Fixed squarely in the upper-left corner in prim writing was a return sender address that ripped the rug out from beneath me.

“Holmes,” I said. “ _Holmes!"_

There was a clatter and a bang as his bedroom door swung open. “What is it, Watson?” said Holmes, charging in, and privately I felt a petty sort of relief that even when he could not abide my presence, he would still come running when I called.

“It’s the letter.” My voice was hollowed out with disbelief. “Willoughby Smith. The letter he sent before he was killed. It came with the morning’s post.”

Holmes's eyebrows shot to his hairline, and in an instant he darted to my side, snatching the letter from my grasp. Tearing it open and dashing its envelope in pieces across the carpet, Holmes unfolded the letter and rapidly scanned his eyes across its contents. Unconsciously, as one hand grasped the letter, the other clamped down on the back of my chair as he leaned over my shoulder.

“Holmes? What does it say?”

Like a slow-moving glacier, chill crept over Holmes’s face and into his voice. “See for yourself,” he said quietly, handing it off to me. Disturbed by his tone, I took it, and began quickly to read.

 _Dear Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson,_ it began. _My name is Willoughby Smith, and I need your help._

My stomach dropped in dismay. He’d written to us for ask for help, and it had come too late. _We_ had been too late. Heart twisting my chest, I read on as Smith introduced himself, explained his recent employment under Nicholas Coram, and began to detail peculiar circumstances that he’d been experiencing since his hiring.

“… _I hear strange footsteps above my room at night and the sound of creaking metal_ ,” I read aloud, voice low around the words of a dead man. It felt as if I were reading a penny dreadful, or a ghost story. “ _The Professor refuses to allow me upstairs, and insists that Mortimer bring down any books I need from his personal collection. Normally I would not find this request unusual, but in a fit of curiosity and regrettable impatience, I once entered his rooms while he and Mortimer were out upon the grounds in order to retrieve a book for a citation from his private bookshelf. In my search I stumbled upon the strangest journal on one of his many shelves, in an unmarked binding. In it are what I believe to be the Professor’s private notes. I know this is a great breach of privacy, but I could not make heads or tails of it even if I wished, Mr. Holmes, for it is written in what I believe to be the Russian language…_ My god, Holmes.”

“The bureau, Watson.” Holmes’s voice was emotionless. “It is there that he must have stored the journal. Coram must have noticed it was missing. It did not matter that Smith could not interpret it. It was a mistake that they could not afford.”

I shook my head with pity, and found I could not stop reading. “ _I’m writing to you now because I cannot understand the strange events which surround me. I could swear that last night I woke to the sound of someone opening my bedroom door. I cannot explain the sounds I hear at night, because I have asked Susan and she says they cannot be her, and they cannot be the Professor. Doctor—_ ” I paused to swallow hard. “ _Doctor Watson, I have read your stories avidly since the publication of your first. I confess I have always loved a mystery. I have always fancied the idea of becoming a detective, and I will do my best to solve the one that surrounds me. But I am no expert, and so I humbly ask you both for aid. I am but a student of history, and with every passing night, I grow more concerned that something untoward is happening, right under my nose._ ” My shoulders slumped. “ _I hope you will take my case, and I wait for your response._ Signed, _Willoughby B. Smith._ ”

Horror and regret swamped my chest like heavy mud. He’d been barely more than a child, inspired by my detective stories towards a novice investigation that might have gotten him killed in the end. My writing had encouraged him to risk, and by the time his plea had reached us, we could only have solved his murder. It was so dreadful I could barely speak.

But I would, because Holmes was as silent as the grave beside me, and I could not stomach yet another weight upon his shoulders for the business at Old Yoxley Place.

“A terrible thing,” I said quietly. “Poor boy. I wish there was something we could have done for him." I looked up at Holmes’s rigid mask. “But it was beyond our power. You enacted justice for him, catching his killers.”

Holmes said nothing, staring over my shoulder at the wallpaper with an empty expression that worried me. Unable to help myself, I reached gently for his elbow. “Holmes—”

He twitched backwards, almost in a flinch, and I jerked back my hand, surprised and burned by the reaction.

“Yes, well. It’s little wonder he believed himself capable of solving such a thing,” Holmes said. Suddenly, his tone had become the strangest cross of dull and sharp-edged. His words were flat, but the voice carrying them had embraced a new, foreign acidity. "Reading your little stories, it seems as simple as looking about and leaping to conclusions. I suppose he fancied himself some clever action hero.”

“Holmes,” I said, taken aback. "That is uncharitable even for you."

“Perhaps if your stories were more precise, he’d never have attempted such foolishness.” My mouth dropped open at the barb, as if I had been struck. Holmes barreled on, steely eyes blank, mouth a cruel twist of distaste. “But then, your tales were never about the truth. My work, the true science of it, has been rendered the jumping point for romantic sixpenny tripe. You’ve witnessed the downsides to _fans,_ Watson, for weeks now, but now you can truly see the consequences of publishing such fiction.”

I stared at him, gutted by the venom in his words. I felt as though I had whiplash, receiving concern and guilt a mere night prior only to be dragged across the coals the very next day.

“You are…you are being cruel, Holmes,” I said. “This is below you. You cannot seriously blame my stories for Smith’s death.”

“No? If not in that, perhaps they share blame in the disaster of yesterday,” Holmes said, voice cutting across me like a thin blade. “After all, how was it that Coram knew to relieve you of your service pistol? It was not _I_ that published private details of our lives for all the criminals of England to peruse at leisure!”

“So now it is _my_ fault we came to danger?” Heartache had bled over into outrage, hot and wounded in my chest. My voice rose as I stood to my feet, thunderous. “It is my fault then, that I was taken at gunpoint? Thrown from a carriage? _Strangled_ beneath creek water until I could fight no longer?”

Holmes went white as death, the condescending mask on his face cracking in its porcelain pane.

“When I asked you not to blame yourself, Holmes,” I said lowly, vibrating with restrained anger, “I did not mean for you to deflect all that hurt you onto my shoulders.”

Holmes turned from me, facing away as if he could not bear to look at me. “It matters no longer," he said, brittle. “Your stories are inconsequential. After all, your muse no longer shines for you as it once did. You will write no more.”

My stomach lurched, as though I had been pitched bodily from a great height. “What?” I said, voice caught in a whisper.

“This case was the final straw,” Holmes said. His handsome features had transformed into untouched stone, and when his gaze moved to me—those smoke grey eyes, completely removed of emotion—it chilled me to my core. “The endless letters, the incessant attention. The risk to you. This is the last adventure we will share, Watson.”

“ _Holmes,_ ” I said, horrified.

“I know, Watson.”

My heart seemed to stop beating within my chest.

“…You—”

“In these last few weeks, I have put the pieces together,” Holmes said. “I admit it took longer than it should have. Perhaps it was a blindness of proximity, the inability to see what was right in front of me for all its closeness. But did you truly believe you could conceal it from me?”

Devastation carved its way through my very bones. _He knows,_ I thought, nauseated with it. _He knows and wants me to leave._

In my anguish, I barely noticed the faint emotion coming loose in Holmes’s expression, flickering strain. As it was, I could not speak, and could only watch, slipping into despair, as Holmes continued, his voice only just unraveling at its aloof, dull edges.

“Our partnership has changed since I returned from the dead,” Holmes said. “You know as well as I that…” He pressed his lips together in a thin, colorless line. “I know you have not forgiven me. And I will not attempt to minimize the…difficulty you have experienced, boarding with me again. But I can no longer ignore the obvious, Watson. I do not know if you had planned to inform me soon, but I will save you the effort—and merely hasten that which was inevitable. I suggest you find lodgings with another more suitable to your preferences.”

With that, my heart broke cleanly in two. This was almost worse than anything I had imagined. His cold callousness was almost more unbearable than rage. I would have nearly preferred it, when only last night, he had been squeezing my hand at my bedside. Slowly, I stiffened to agonizing attention.

“I see,” I said, with as much rigidness as I could muster. I could not bear to fall to pieces before him and so reached for my history in the service, the detachment of setting bones, staunching blood, and marching through the dead. _Stiff upper lip, Watson,_ my captain had once told me. _Even when you’re bleeding. You can’t stitch a wound if you are broken. Live to suffer the pain later._

I had nothing left but pride. But I had survived worse than this.

“Very well, Holmes,” I said woodenly. “I understand.” I swallowed once. “I will make arrangements to sleep elsewhere this evening, and will move my things to temporary lodgings tomorrow.”

Holmes did not look by any measure satisfied with my agreement. Instead he turned away, with an indifference that stung more than vitriol ever could. 

“Fine,” he said to the wall. His blunt dismissal was the final dagger to my heart, and I was almost glad to see him move away, retreating towards his bedroom. “I will inform Ms. Hudson to put an advert in the morning post.”

At the sight of his back, my heart leapt to my throat in sudden despair. “Holmes,” I choked out, against every shred of wisdom. My nerves quailed as Holmes stilled, hesitating where he stood.

I needed to say something. Not what I’d always longed to, but _something._ I could not bear to part like this. Not after so many years, not with what he meant to me even now.

“…For whatever it’s worth,” I managed, voice thick. “I never wanted…” My voice broke, but through force of sheer will I mastered it, hammering it even. “I am sorry, Holmes. I never meant to cause you discomfort. Our partnership has been…my privilege. And so was your friendship. Thank you for…everything.”

With that, I found I could not say another word without falling apart at my seams. Wordlessly, I reached for my cane, moved across the room towards the coat rack, and painstakingly began to shrug on my coat for the walk to the street to find a cab. I did not want to linger in this place a moment longer, else it would sink in that I had just lost my home.

Holmes did not respond, remaining as still as a statue as I reached for my hat, and it was only when I moved towards the door that he finally spoke.

“What did you mean?”

The question froze me in my tracks, and so did the hesitation in it.

“What?”

Holmes had turned to look at me. I was shocked to see that his eyes had lost their steel, and to hear a strange, uncertain thread in his voice.

“What did you mean,” he asked faintly, “when you said you intended me no discomfort?”

I opened my mouth but did not immediately find the words. “I don’t…” I said, trailing off in confusion. “Why do you…”

“Please, Watson,” Holmes said. I blinked at the sound of that word in his voice, struck by its sudden and intense fragility. “If there is a chance that I have…” His eyes bored into mine. “Tell me what you meant.”

Swallowing through the dismay of dragging this on longer, my hand clenched tightly over my cane. “I meant only that I did not wish to make you uncomfortable, Holmes,” I said quietly. “With…with my feelings. With my affection for you.”

Holmes stared at me, eyes wide and shining.

“Watson,” he breathed. 

“Holmes, I’m sorry but I cannot—this is too painful for me.” Mortified, I turned to go with stinging in my eyes.

“Never in my life have I made such an egregious error in judgement,” Holmes said, voice hushed and quick. He all but lurched forward towards me, his face seized with urgency. “I beg you not to take a step further before I apologize for what I—for what is clearly the greatest miscalculation I have ever drawn.”

"I—" 

" _Please,"_ Holmes pleaded.

I gaped at him. Gone was the mask and his composure. Now, Holmes looked desperate. “Holmes—”

“My dear Watson," Holmes whispered. My heart clenched at the fond term, which I had believed moments ago lost to my ears. "I would get down on my knees, to atone for the pain I have just caused you. On the heels of my failure to protect you I have harmed you more deeply and more callously than Nicholas Coram ever could. I am ashamed of my stupidity, and my willingness to harm someone so dear to me under false pretenses.”

“ _Holmes_ ,” I said, frayed with misunderstanding. “I don’t—”

“I thought you wanted to leave,” Holmes whispered. The words hit me like a mortar shell, reverberating shock down my spine. “I believed it. Contrived every piece of evidence I observed to support it. And then, to shield myself, I decided to confront you, with deliberate unkindness, because I had deluded myself into believing it was safer for you to go. That it would be less painful for us both, if you left in anger, rather than with regret. It was selfish and illogical and I—” His voice snapped, buckling under strain, and his eyes glimmered with emotion. “It seems even with the best of intentions, I manage to cause you pain.”

“Why—why on Earth would you think…” I trailed off, disbelieving. I had never encountered such a mistake in Holmes’s reasoning before this moment. _Leave?_ All I wanted in this world was to be beside him.

“The letters,” Holmes said. Misery seeped into the pale regret on his face. “I knew you dreaded them. I had thought that you…I had come to the poor conclusion you resented the public attention your stories have brought to us. You did not care for any client that came to us that was attracted here through them, and in recent weeks you have…” Holmes trailed off uncertainly, and his ivory cheeks seemed to flush as his gaze dropped to the floor.

“You do not smile as often as you did before, Watson,” he said finally, muted. “Your laughter is a rarer thing. I believed at first that you had simply not forgiven me for deceiving you for so long, but then I began to notice that you were…monitoring your expressions in my presence. Writing less. I perceived this as an attempt on your part to…distance yourself. From me. That upon my return, you realized the joy in our partnership had diminished.”

I struggled to find the words with which to speak.

“It is unprecedented, Holmes,” I managed. “For all your intellect, I do believe that you are the most colossal fool in England.”

Holmes's eyes flew up from the floor to meet mine.

“I do not like the ceaseless letters, Holmes, because they annoy you, and when you are annoyed, you become a ridiculous child.” Holmes opened his mouth to speak, but I steamed directly over him. “I did not like fannish clients, because they are more interested in flashing their bosoms than hiring you for a case, and in their presence, I become unfairly jealous. And while I _have_ been monitoring my emotions around you, Holmes, it is because I did not want you to notice that I’m horribly, irreversibly in love with you.”

It was Holmes’s turn to stare in disbelief. Within, I reeled at my own boldness.

“…In love?” He said the words like he could not fathom their meaning.

“Unquestionably,” I said. My heart pounded in my chest like engine pistons. I exhaled, sharply enough it felt I would fall apart on its release. "I knew you could not reciprocate, so I did not tell you. I couldn't, for fear of jeopardizing our friendship. But I do not—have not ever wanted to leave, Holmes. I am...happier than I have ever been, being your partner. I would change my life for nothing."

"You nearly lost your life yesterday," Holmes said softly. "And you still believe yourself in love with me?"

"I do not _believe_ ," I retorted. "I _know_. I have loved men before."

"You married," Holmes said quietly, almost as if to himself but for the way his gaze held mine. "I am not mistaken in that. You loved Mary Morstan."

My heart thudded with old grief at the sound of her name. "With all that I am," I said thickly. "But before her, I loved men and women both. And after her...I loved you."

"I would have seen it," Holmes murmured. He looked at me like he had never truly seen me before. "I would have..."

"We have just established, my dear fellow, that you can be a fool on occasion," I said gently. Holmes just looked at me, eyes glittering. "I know my own heart. Even before you appeared in my clinic alive and shocked me out of my wits, you owned it."

"I..." Holmes's voice suddenly cracked. In that instant, he looked young. Young, pained, and horribly vulnerable. "Why?"

 _Why?_ The question touched some deep part of me with its artlessness. Holmes asked it like he genuinely had no notion why I could ever harbor such feelings. Was it truly so unknown to him, his own allure? Or did he not understand how I could be brought to see it?

"I told you last night, Holmes. You are the greatest friend I have ever known." I lifted helpless hands and dropped them. "I have always thought so. It is inevitable that I would love you. You are..." A bashful lump formed in my throat. "You are extraordinary."

"Moments ago I made you think I was a heartless boor," he whispered. "Worse, that I barely cared for you at all. Because I was afraid of being hurt by your leaving, I acted like a child and I used my skills to pretend you mean nothing to me. How can you still speak to me this way after that?"

"You made a mistake, Holmes. Recall I misunderstood you, too. I thought you had learned of my feelings, that you were casting me out for them. Many men would react poorly to learning they were loved by another."

"I am not like other men," Holmes said, with a plainness that quivered at the corners. "In that respect, or others. Others do not endanger you with every other case, Watson. Others do not fail to protect you from danger. Others do not _lie_ to those dearest to them for years and disappear." Holmes swallowed. "I cannot...I cannot own your heart, Watson, not when I have treated it so poorly."

"I forgive you."

Holmes looked near to shattering.

" _Why?_ " he asked, voice broken. "I have not...I do not deserve it. _"_

I had only simple answers. "Because you are a good man," I said. "And because I love you terribly."

"Even believing I could not possibly reciprocate your feelings?"

That had an equally simple answer. "I cared for you deeply long before I loved you, Holmes. I do not need what you cannot give, when your friendship has long been enough for me."

"And if I could?"

I stared at him. "If you could?" I echoed.

His gaze held mine, oceans deep and leagues exposed. "If I could reciprocate your feelings?"

My heart skipped several beats. "You...I..."

"For weeks I have been dreading the moment you decided to tell me you were leaving. At first, I did all I could to maintain your interest. I took intriguing cases, and when that did not seem to work, I stopped taking cases entirely. But the distance remained. It took whatever sleep I had left. I could not think of a way to keep you to stay. And I could not convince myself, if leaving was what you truly wanted, that I could stand in your way. My decision to hasten the end was sealed when..." Holmes paused, and muted agony flickered across his face. "When I realized what it would be like, to lose you to the violence of my work. I could not _bear_ it, Watson."

"Holmes..."

"I held your body in my arms and thought you had died because of my cowardice. Because of my inability to let you go.” A bleak, watery smile moved across his face. "And so I chose to drive you out myself. And I hurt you, even though you mean more to me than any soul on this earth. You see, Watson," His cheeks were flushed, and at his sides, his pale hands trembled. "I reciprocate your feelings more than you know. And this is what it is, to be loved by me." His voice cracked even as his mouth twitched into a wider smile, as awful as it was beautiful. "It is far less than you deserve."

I felt as if I had been struck by lightning.

"You..." I could hardly speak. "You love me?"

"Beyond reason," said Holmes, threadbare.

(I am a cautious man. For all that I love the thrill of the chase over cobblestones, I am, ultimately, a man of careful action. I would make a poor doctor otherwise. So I do not exaggerate when I say my next action happened without thought or care for consequences. I acted, in a moment of emotion, on a total impulse.)

In three strides, I crossed the sitting room floor and took Holmes's face in my hands. In the space between one moment and the next, I watched his eyes widen in shock and knew that brilliant mind had understood my aim as quickly as I had summoned it, and it was because he stared at me unblinking and did not step back, did not lean away, that I seized the opportunity at hand. I cradled his lovely face in mine, and I kissed him.

* * *

A knock at the door stops my writing in its tracks. I bite down the embarrassed chuckle that wells up in my throat as I look up into a room that has much brightened with morning light since I first started my recounting. My heart hammers even just recalling my impulsive action two weeks ago. The feeling of his lips on mine...

“Watson?”

On the other side of the door, Holmes sounds oddly tentative. It is a strange thing, for him to seek me in my rooms so early in the morning without a case to encourage him. Within my ribcage, the flutter that had kicked up in my chest at my reminiscing picks up like a hummingbird.

“I’m awake,” I say, just loud enough for him to hear. “Come in, Holmes.”

Gingerly, my bedroom door swings open. Holmes enters in his light sleep robe, looking so out of place and uncertain in the confines of my bedroom that it nearly dazes me for a moment.

“What is it, my dear fellow?”

Holmes’s eyes trail down my body and even though I no longer need to hide it, I withhold a shiver under their attention.

“You slept poorly,” he says, frowning unhappily.

“I have suffered from poor sleep for far longer than I have known you, Holmes." I lift a hand, extending it to the sheets in front of me. “Come here.”

Holmes blinks, and with a minor hesitance that I can only find terribly endearing, he moves to edge of my bed and carefully sits down, facing me. The distance between us is tantalizingly little, but I do not reach forward to close it. Something has crawled beneath Holmes’s skin this morning, if the dark circles beneath his ashen eyes me speak no better.

“I woke quite early this morning. I heard you sit up in bed from downstairs.”

“The rusty spring,” I say, smiling wryly. Holmes nods, mouth twitching.

“I…was uncertain if you would…if you would have welcomed my presence after a dream that disturbed you,” he admits. “But now, perhaps…”

Overcome with fondness, I stretch my hand across the sheets to find his. I entwine his cold fingers with mine, my heart overfull.

“You are welcome in my room whenever you want, Holmes." Since my return home, our relationship has been a series of learning and renegotiating boundaries. For Holmes, it is a course of education: traditional romance holds no interest for him, and acts of physical intimacy have proven equal parts discovery and mutual curiosity.

Holmes’s eyebrow ticks upwards. “You may come to regret that invitation, Watson,” he says. I tip my head back in a easy laugh, and watch as his nerves visibly abate at the sound of it.

“Perhaps,” I admit. “For cases, there may be cause for restraint. But when you are concerned, my door is always open.”

“Was there cause for it?” His mouth forms a delicate smile, but it does not fully touch his eyes. “Concern?”

I sigh. He will not let go of it unless I confess it all, and I have learned the ill-wisdom of leaving him to draw his own conclusions regarding my feelings.

“My sleep was…disturbed some hours ago,” I say, reluctantly, lips pressing together. I am not in the practice of admitting such weakness to others, but Holmes is no longer only a friend—if he had ever been merely that. “I did not wish to wake you for something so simple as a nightmare, so I sat in bed to write until morning.”

“A nightmare,” Holmes repeats, expression grave and worse, sorrowful. “But not of the war.”

I frown at him. “How did—”

Slowly, Holmes reaches across the space between us. His slim fingers find my other hand, and I close my eyes. Unconsciously, my free hand had crept up to my neck, brushing yellow bruises that had finally begun to fade to the normal color of health. Gently, his touch replaces mine, sending goosebumps down my spine as he traces the column of my neck down to the line of my collarbone.

“I see the guilt on your face, Holmes,” I say quietly. “There’s no reason for it.”

Holmes does not respond to that. Instead, his gaze solemnly tracks the surface of my skin, and heat blooms in my cheeks.

“I knew the request to testify had upset you,” Holmes mutters.

“It did not upset me,” I protest, and cinereal eyes flicker to mine, eyebrow up and skeptical. Carefully, I exhale.

“I wasn't upset," I say honestly, and swallow my pride. "But it may have...stirred some memories. I do have my methods for coping with such things." I gesture to my journal, which lay beside me.

"...You may always come to me, in the occasion they fail to work," Holmes says, expression serious despite the reservation in the offer.

My stomach clenches at the idea. "I have no intention of disturbing you with my...mental frailty in the dead of night, Holmes."

"You are the farthest thing from _frail,_ Watson," Holmes snaps, disapproval hardening his features. "If I am not permitted the blame for your nightmares, then neither should you be."

"I—”

"Come to me, should they occur again," he says abruptly.

"Holmes—”

"I have no desire to sit fretting over you as I did this morning like some useless nanny. And it does you no good to be alone when they clearly disturb you enough to keep you awake for hours after they pass."

 _Fretting?_ Is that what he'd been doing? The very concept of Holmes doing so is as ludicrous as it is touching. "I don't want to impose on _your_ sleep as well," I say, exasperated and minorly embarrassed. "I will be fine, Holmes."

"There is nothing in this world you could do that would make me pity you, Watson," Holmes intones, and I bite the inside of my cheek at the declaration. Only Holmes could soothe my greatest fear without effort. "You are a soldier who has seen and experienced the horrors of combat. Nightmares, like war wounds, are nothing to be ashamed of."

"...I know," I sigh. "I _am_ a medical doctor, Holmes."

Holmes scowls briefly, but then his expression shifts in sudden thought.

"Bedsharing may help," he offers, peering at me from the corner of his eyes. "If anything, I could be nearby to offer distraction until you fall asleep again."

I stare at him. We had not even discussed that element of a relationship. "Are you suggesting—”

"It is worth investigating, at least until the trial is over," Holmes says, matter-of-fact, and at that, his temperament became subdued. "Your testimony isn’t necessary for conviction, Watson. Mine will be more than enough. You can give a deposition to Hopkins and never be confronted with the name Coram again, if you do not wish it.”

I shake my head. “Only I can testify what happened when the carriage crashed, Holmes. Otherwise, it could be argued that you had no cause to shoot Professor Coram like you did, and you yourself could be implicated for a crime.”

“They would not convict me,” Holmes huffs, dismissive, and I roll my eyes.

“Forgive me if I don’t leave such things to chance. I am not afraid to testify, Holmes. I want to see them both put away as much as you do.”

“Perhaps not quite as much,” Holmes said, shadows crossing his face. I sigh again, and finally, I decide to close the distance between us by leaning forward and pressing my lips to that marble brow.

“Watson,” Holmes says, softening, and I pull away to smile tiredly at him.

“Do not worry.”

“I am not worried,” Holmes mumbles.

“No?” I incline my head to where he sits on my bed. "You only just admitted to fretting, my dear man."

Holmes's mouth twitches. “The case is well in the hands of the Yard,” he says primly. A beat, and he looks up at me through his eyelashes. “But however illogical it may be, I am always concerned about your welfare, Watson.”

The admission, so new and so earnest, sends my pulse to thrum, rushing warmth through my veins. “The feeling is quite mutual, my dear Holmes,” I say softly. The corner of his mouth curls in a fond smile, and carefully I slide a hand beneath his proud chin and tip up his face to mine. I press my lips to his, wondering not for the last time over their profound smoothness, and I smile against his mouth when his own hands tentatively reach for me.

Before the kiss could deepen and those nimble hands could drive me to carelessness, I pull away with a short chuckle. “I must wash up. I believe we need to be at the station by eight, and I don't intend to be late.”

Holmes looks somewhat put out as I climb to my feet, his hair ruffled from lack of sleep, crisp robe wrinkled, lips pink with stimulation. For years I had thought Holmes to be the most handsome man I had ever come across, and long believed he was at his most lovely in the throes of victory. Now, I have cause to revise that belief. Holmes never looks more becoming that he does disheveled, pupils blown, and looking at me like I am something wanted. I am lost to that look, just as I am lost to the open affection on his face, and so I cave to my baser impulses. I stoop as well as I am able after a sleepless night and cup his face, thumbs sliding across his noble cheekbones as I draw him in for another kiss.

“Watson,” he says against my mouth. Thrill skitters beneath my skin at the sound of my name in his voice at such a register, low and amorous, tones I never before knew him capable of and now pursue without rest. “There is time enough.”

My hands slide down the pale stay of his neck. “Is there?” I murmur, smiling against his skin as my mouth crept to the corner of his, trailing down his chin to his jaw. Slowly, his fingers curl in the fabric of my sleep shirt, encouraging me downward over him.

“Five minutes to freshen up,” he says in my ear. Elegant fingers move to card idly through my hair. “Another five to dress. Twenty for tea and breakfast, else you’ll be unreasonable the entire morning—”

“Unreasonable,” I huff, propping over him as he falls back onto the mattress. “Nothing unreasonable about wanting a meal in the mornings…”

“—And twenty-eight minutes to the station, give or take a few if it rains,” he hums, his voice shifting somewhat in timber, like the string of an instrument, as I focus my attention on the pulse point in his neck. 

“Nearly an hour,” I say consideringly, as his hands slide up my back. My legs slot carefully between his, mindful not to press too much of my weight upon him, and the contact practically simmers beneath the surface of my skin. The fabric of Holmes’s sleepshirt is worn and thin to the point of madness.

“With ample minutes to spare,” Holmes says, and the faint breathlessness I hear in his voice is a quality to covet.

“I’m sure I could think of something with which to occupy our morning,” I say. The joy in my own voice cannot be disguised, and Old Yoxley Place is a barely a memory. What else can I be but content? With Holmes beneath me, striking beyond words, those keen eyes sparkling with mischief, I can hardly ask for more in life.

“I daresay so,” he says, smiling. “And we shan’t have time later.”

I pause in my ministrations above him, halfway having insinuated my hands beneath his sleepshirt in search of more skin. I lift an inquiring eyebrow, and his smile transforms into something altogether devilish.

“We are expecting a client, Watson,” he says, eyes bright. “He’s returned to London three weeks ahead of schedule, and he wants to meet us tonight.”

“Tonight?”

Holmes looks smug. “I presume his attempt to locate the diamonds stolen from his flat last month failed. It was a wasted effort to look to the mainland, they’re almost certainly in the city.”

“Diamonds?”

“Oh yes,” Holmes purrs. “ _Three._ Seven carats each.”

“Good lord. What the devil was he doing, storing them in his home?”

“An excellent question, my dear Watson,” he says archly. “I do believe our next client is a smuggler.”

“A—a _smuggler_?” I lean up from him, crossing my arms. “ _Really,_ Holmes.”

Holmes pushes himself up beneath me, bringing his face closer to mine. His eyes dance with mirth. “It is a truly unique case. A locked door, a cracked safe with a secret code, and a buyer that mysteriously disappeared. He will be by before six, Watson, because our evening is also quite busy—”

“I still don’t think we should—why is our evening booked as well? Don’t tell me we’ve another meeting?”

“No,” said Holmes, eyes warm. “But we do have an engagement.”

“An engagement?”

“Reservations at Simpson’s at seven. And tickets to the symphony at eight thirty. Mendelssohn.”

“Oh,” I say softly, touched. “That sounds…lovely, Holmes. I do love Mendelssohn.”

“I know. As do I.”

I smile at him. “And you say you’ve no talent at this.”

A light blush spreads beneath his cheeks, roses under a blanket of snow. “Romance may not be my purview, Watson, but I do know how to observe. Fine cuisine and finer music are interests we share.”

“Shared interests is a good deal of it,” I say, bending down. “The rest is well within order.” To make the point, I kiss him lightly. Carefully, I press him backwards, guiding him supine against my bed sheets, and then make another. “I love you.”

His eyes shine like the waves of the Channel on a cold wintry morning. “And I you,” he says quietly. His answering smile is small and completely breathtaking. My heart lifts in my chest, lighter than air.

“…I am aware of the difference,” I began, cracking a grin, “when you are genuinely charming or merely playing at romance, Holmes. Your attempt to distract me from the fact our client is a smuggler is quite opaque.”

Holmes lets out one of his low, diabolical chuckles, the mischievous sort that spells no end to trouble. “I shall work on my cunning, Watson.”

“That’s not quite what I—”

“I welcome the challenge, my dear fellow,” Holmes says, grinning ear to ear, and this time, it is he who kisses me.

_End._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so so much for all the lovely comments and kudoses! I had such a lovely time writing this and I hope you guys enjoyed the final chapter <3
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts if you liked the story, or hit me up @apprenticeofdoyle on tumblr, i'd love to hear from you. happy holmestice month, and be safe and well.


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